Accelerating coordination in temporal networks by engineering the link order

Abstract

Social dynamics on a network may be accelerated or decelerated depending on which pairs of individuals in the network communicate early and which pairs do later. The order with which the links in a given network are sequentially used, which we call the link order, may be a strong determinant of dynamical behaviour on networks, potentially adding a new dimension to effects of temporal networks relative to static networks. Here we study the effect of the link order on linear coordination (i.e., synchronisation) dynamics. We show that the coordination speed considerably depends on specific orders of links. In addition, applying each single link for a long time to ensure strong pairwise coordination before moving to a next pair of individuals does not often enhance coordination of the entire network. We also implement a simple greedy algorithm to optimise the link order in favour of fast coordination.