A Greedy Approach for Dynamic Control of Diffusion Processes in Networks

This paper investigates the control of a diffusion process by utilizing real-time information. More specifically, we allow the network administrator to adjust the allocation of control resources, a set of treatments that increase the recovery rate of infected nodes, according to the evolution of the diffusion process. We first present a novel framework for describing a large class of dynamic control strategies. These strategies rely on sorting the nodes according to a priority score in order to treat more sensitive regions first. Then, we propose the Largest Reduction in Infectious Edges (LRIE) control strategy which is based on a greedy minimization of the cost associated to the undesired diffusion, and has the benefits of being efficient and easy to implement. Our simulations, which were conducted using a software package that we developed and made available to the community, show that the LRIE strategy substantially outperforms its competitors in a wide range of scenarios.