Distributed randomized algorithms for opinion formation, centrality computation and power systems estimation: A tutorial overview

In this tutorial paper, we study three specific applications: opinion formation in social networks, centrality measures in complex networks and estimation problems in large-scale power systems. These applications fall under a general framework which aims at the construction of algorithms for distributed computation over a network. The two key ingredients of randomization and time-averaging are used, together with a local gossip communication protocol, to obtain convergence of these distributed algorithms to the global synchronous dynamics.