Enhancing the robustness of complex networks against edge-based-attack cascading failures

Existing studies indicated that it is crucial to design network structures with well tolerance against potential attacks and failures in reality, and several attack models have been proposed and lucubrated. Aiming at enhancing network robustness suffering from edge-based attack cascading failures, we first propose a measure, Rce, to numerically evaluate the robustness of networks under cascading failures, and then a memetic algorithm, termed as MA-Rce, is devised to optimize network robustness without changing the degree distribution. The experimental results on synthetic and real-world networks show that MA-Rce can provide candidate networks with better anti-attack performance initialized by an initial network, also outperforms exist heuristic optimization algorithm, which facilitates theoretic analyses and provides potential solutions to realistic dilemmas in networked systems for decision makers.