Closeness Centrality Measures in Fuzzy Enterprise Technology Innovation Cooperation Networks

Abstract

Centrality analysis is one of the most important and commonly used tools in social networks. For social networks where edges are just present or absent and have no more information attached, many centrality measures have been presented, such as degree, closeness, betweenness, eigenvector and Laplacian centrality. There has been a growing need to design centrality measures for fuzzy enterprise technology innovation cooperation networks (FETICNs), because FETICNs where edges are attached with fuzzy technical cooperation relation would contain rich information. In this paper, we propose some new centrality measures called fuzzy logarithm attenuation closeness centrality and fuzzy logarithm attenuation closeness centralization which are applicable to the FETICNs. It unveils more structural information about fuzzy technical cooperation relation, attenuation factor, and connectivity of the FETICNs. Furthermore, we investigate the validness of a new centrality measure by illustrating this method to an experimental study and obtain reliable results, which provide strong evidences to the new measure’s utility.