Decentralized network control, optimization and random walks on networks
In the last years several problems been studied at the interface between statistical physics and computer science. The reason being that often these problems can be reinterpreted in the language of physics of disordered systems, where a big number of variables interacts through local fields dependent on the state of the surrounding neighborhood. Among the numerous applications of combinatorial optimisation the optimal routing on communication networks is the subject of the first part of the thesis. We will exploit the cavity method to formulate efficient algorithms of type message-passing and thus solve several variants of the problem through its numerical implementation. At a second stage, we will describe a model to approximate the dynamic version of the cavity method which allows to decrease the complexity of the problem from exponential to polynomial in time. This will be obtained by using the Matrix Product State formalism of quantum mechanics. Another topic that has attracted much interest in statistical physics of dynamic processes is the random walk on networks. The theory has been developed since many years in the case the underneath topology is a d-dimensional lattice. On the contrary the case of random networks has been tackled only in the past decade, leaving many questions still open for answers. Unravelling several aspects of this topic will be the subject of the second part of the thesis. In particular we will study the average number of distinct sites visited during a random walk and characterize its behaviour as a function of the graph topology. Finally, we will address the rare events statistics associated to random walks on networks by using the large-deviations formalism. Two types of dynamic phase transitions will arise from numerical simulations, unveiling important aspects of this problems. We will conclude outlining the main results of an independent work developed in the context of out-of-equilibrium physics. A solvable system made of two Brownian particles surrounded by a thermal bath will be studied providing details about a bath-mediated interaction arising for the presence of the bath.