Ant Colony Optimization for the Control of Pollutant Spreading on Social Networks

The rapid development of online social networks not only enables prompt and convenient dissemination of desirable information but also incurs fast and wide propagation of undesirable information. A common way to control the spread of pollutants is to block some nodes, but such a strategy may affect the service quality of a social network and leads to a high control cost if too many nodes are blocked. This paper considers the node selection problem as a biobjective optimization problem to find a subset of nodes to be blocked so that the effect of the control is maximized while the cost of the control is minimized. To solve this problem, we design an ant colony optimization algorithm with an adaptive dimension size selection under the multiobjective evolutionary algorithm framework based on decomposition (MOEA/D-ADACO). The proposed algorithm divides the biobjective problem into a set of single-objective subproblems and each ant takes charge of optimizing one subproblem. Moreover, two types of pheromone and heuristic information are incorporated into MOEA/D-ADACO, that is, pheromone and heuristic information of dimension size selection and that of node selection. While constructing solutions, the ants first determine the dimension size according to the former type of pheromone and heuristic information. Then, the ants select a specific number of nodes to build solutions according to the latter type of pheromone and heuristic information. Experiments conducted on a set of real-world online social networks confirm that the proposed biobjective optimization model and the developed MOEA/D-ADACO are promising for the pollutant spreading control.