Manipulation of extreme events on scale-free networks

Abstract

Extreme events taking place on networks are not uncommon. We show that it is possible to manipulate the extreme events occurrence probabilities and its distribution over the nodes on scale-free networks by tuning the nodal capacity. This can be used to reduce the number of extreme events occurrences on a network. However monotonic nodal capacity enhancements, beyond a point, do not lead to any substantial reduction in the number of extreme events. We point out the practical implication of this result for network design in the context of reducing extreme events occurrences.