Looping Network Meetings

#62 January 27, 2025

Monday 15:00 (Paris/Warsaw time)

Dirk Witthaut (Forschungszentrum Jülich)

Graph duality in flow networks

Abstract:
Supply networks in nature and engineering share many important properties. They are built to operate reliably under changing external conditions and random failures. Many of these networks are well described by Ohm’s and Kirchhoff’s laws: The flow over an edge is proportional to the gradient of a potential and currents must be conserved at the nodes. In this talk I will introduce a different perspective on flow networks in nature and engineering via graph duality. I will show how Ohm’s and Kirchhoff’s laws translate to the dual graph and harness this approach to address some important questions in network science: How do failures spread in a flow network and how can they be contained? Can we generalize the idea of network communities? How can we speed up computations in network engineering and operation?

Recording