LAUSR

Abstract The problem of network disintegration, which aims at identifying the critical nodes or edges whose removal will lead to a network collapse, has attracted much attention due to its wide applications. This paper focuses on the disintegration of directed networks. We propose a disintegration strategy based on tabu search. Experiments show that the disintegration effect of our strategy is obviously better than those of typical disintegration strategies based on local structural properties. Moreover, we find that the critical nodes identified to remove in directed networks are not those nodes with large degree or betweenness centrality that always are the crucial properties in undirected network.