Effects of zealots in protecting social systems against cascading failures

• Main Author: Au, Chun Hin
• Other Authors: XIAO Gaoxi
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Computer hardware, software and systems
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/149347
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Zealots within social network are fanatical individuals whose opinions remain unwavering regardless of social pressure from others or when they are presented with information that conflicts with their personal views and opinions. In this project, we wished to determine how the presence of zealots may help in protecting social systems from cascading failures. This is done through the creation of an uncorrelated random scale-free network with zealots to simulate a real-life social network. The network would then undergo cascading failures through the KQ cascade model. The results obtained was analysed to observe the impacts of zealots in the survivability of the network after cascading failures. The project was implemented using Python programming language and NetworkX Python Package.