An Improved Differential Evolution Framework Using Network Topology Information for Critical Nodes Detection

Critical nodes detection (CND) focuses on identifying the nodes that significantly impact the network’s robustness and is applied in various fields such as power grids, communication networks, and disease spreading. However, detecting the critical nodes is a challenging nondeterministic polynomial time complete (NP-complete) problem. One possible solution is using the evolutionary algorithm which has a high global search capability. However, the existing evolutionary algorithms for CND only focus on independent nodes, ignoring the underlying relationship among the nodes. Thus, in this work, we proposed a new topology-combined differential evolution framework called TDE to explore the possibility of improving the performance by fusing topology information, which designs individual genotypes through node degree, and new mutation and decoding-based selection operators are designed for these genotypes to use topology information effectively. The experiments on synthetic and real networks show that it is feasible to improve the search capability of the algorithm by fusing node degree information.