Epidemic spreading on complex networks with weighted adaptive strategy

Abstract

We introduce a weighted adaptive network model to investigate the epidemic dynamics based on a susceptible-infective-susceptible (SIS) pattern, where the weight of a link describes the contact strength between two connected individuals. In the model, a susceptible node is able to transfer the weight of the link connecting an infected neighbor to a link connecting one of its susceptible neighbors. It is found that this weight adaption process could strongly aggravate the destructiveness of an epidemic and leads to a new population relation. Moreover, the effectiveness of a simple epidemic control strategy on a weighted adaptive network is examined. The results show that the weight adaption process may reduce the strategy efficiency. Analysis are presented and the results support our numerical simulations. © 2012 IEEE.