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Computational Ecology and Software, 2016, 6(4): 130-138
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Article

Structural control of ecological and biological networks

Alessandro Ferrarini
Department of Evolutionary and Functional Biology, University of Parma, Via G. Saragat 4, I-43100 Parma, Italy

Received 26 July 2016;Accepted 5 September 2016;Published 1 December 2016
IAEES

Abstract
Evolutionary Network Control (ENC) allows the control of any kind of ecological and biological network, with an arbitrary number of nodes and links. In this work, ENC has been further expanded to incorporate the structural control of any kind of ecological and biological network. The rationale behind Structural ENC is that during field experiments and manipulations it could result difficult to quantitatively control stocks and flows in order to drive the ecological or biological network towards the desired state. In these cases, similar results can be achieved using a more parsimonious approach based on the inhibition of one or several nodes and/or edges. Although network control through the inhibition of one or several nodes and/or edges is a kind of structural control that acts impolitely if compared to the functional control previously used by ENC, it is more parsimonious from a feasibility (i.e. in situ application) viewpoint, hence in some cases it could be the most feasible solution for the control of the real networks.

Keywords dynamical networks;genetic algorithms;Evolutionary Network Control;edge inhibition;node inhibition;network control;system dynamics.

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