Spatiotemporal Input Control: Leveraging Temporal Variation in Network Dynamics

The number of available control sources is a limiting factor to many network control tasks. A lack of input sources can result in compromised controllability and/or sub-optimal network performance, as noted in engineering applications such as the smart grids. The mechanism can be explained by a linear time-invariant model, where structural controllability sets a lower bound on the number of required sources. Inspired by the ubiquity of time-varying topologies in the real world, we propose the strategy of spatiotemporal input control to overcome the source-related limit by exploiting temporal variation of the network topology. We theoretically prove that under this regime, the required number of sources can always be reduced to 2. It is further shown that the cost of control depends on two hyperparameters, the numbers of sources and intervals, in a trade-off fashion. As a demonstration, we achieve controllability over a complex network resembling the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans using as few as 6% of the sources predicted by a static control model. This example underlines the potential of utilizing topological variation in complex network control problems.