Probing Complexity with Epidemics: A New Reactive Immunization Strategy

Abstract

Epidemic evolution on complex networks strongly depends on their topology and the infection dynamical properties, as highly connected nodes and individuals exposed to the contagion have competing roles in the disease spreading. In this spirit, we propose a new immunization strategy exploiting the knowledge of network geometry and dynamical information about the spreading infection. The flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed scheme are successfully tested with numerical simulations on a wide set of complex networks.