Network isolators inhibit failure spreading in complex networks

Franz Kaiser, Vito Latora and Dirk Witthaut ()
Additional contact information
Franz Kaiser: Forschungszentrum Jülich, Institute for Energy and Climate Research (IEK-STE)
Vito Latora: Queen Mary University of London
Dirk Witthaut: Forschungszentrum Jülich, Institute for Energy and Climate Research (IEK-STE)

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract In our daily lives, we rely on the proper functioning of supply networks, from power grids to water transmission systems. A single failure in these critical infrastructures can lead to a complete collapse through a cascading failure mechanism. Counteracting strategies are thus heavily sought after. In this article, we introduce a general framework to analyse the spreading of failures in complex networks and demostrate that not only decreasing but also increasing the connectivity of the network can be an effective method to contain damages. We rigorously prove the existence of certain subgraphs, called network isolators, that can completely inhibit any failure spreading, and we show how to create such isolators in synthetic and real-world networks. The addition of selected links can thus prevent large scale outages as demonstrated for power transmission grids.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23292-9 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-23292-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23292-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().