A networked approach to dynamic analysis of social system vulnerability

Abstract

Given the high vulnerability of social system to disruptions, it is very critical to make scientific analysis on the vulnerability of social system and further manage its vulnerability, especially for today's highly networked society. The focus of this work is on the dynamic analysis for the vulnerability of social system under considering the cascading phenomenon. Considering that a social system with interconnected agents is better modeled as a network than as a linear chain, we introduce a networked approach to investigate the structural characteristics of social system first. Then a social system is modeled as a social network graph. Furthermore, a cascading model and a new vulnerability measurement based on the model are proposed to analyze the vulnerability of social network. Finally, the illustrative example of a real social system is given to indicate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed framework. The study provides some new insights about the vulnerability of social system, and is also helpful to discover the global potential behaviors during cascading failure spreading within social system.