Complex scheduling network: an objective performance testing platform for evaluating vital nodes identification algorithms

Abstract

With the widespread application of complex network theory, identifying vital nodes is an important part of complex network analysis, which has been a key issue in analyzing the characteristics of network structure and functions. Although many centrality measures have been proposed to identify vital nodes, there is still a lack of an objective performance testing platform for evaluating vital nodes identification algorithms. This study introduces the complex scheduling network as an objective performance testing platform where the identification of vital nodes directly determines the decision-making in each decision scenario through the development of heuristic algorithms upon centrality measures, and therefore, the optimization goals of scheduling problems can be regarded as an objective index for evaluating vital node identification algorithms. Finally, the undirected network obtained by the open shop scheduling problem is taken as an example to analyze and evaluate the performance of various vital node identification algorithms.