Description: Network isolators inhibit failure spreading in complex networks

This title appears in the Scientific Report : 2021

Network isolators inhibit failure spreading in complex networks

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....

Personal Name(s):	Kaiser, Franz
	Latora, Vito / Witthaut, Dirk (Corresponding author)
Contributing Institute:	Systemforschung und Technologische Entwicklung; IEK-STE
Published in:	Nature Communications, 12 (2021) 1, S. 3143
Imprint:	[London] Nature Publishing Group UK 2021
DOI:	10.1038/s41467-021-23292-9
Document Type:	Journal Article
Research Program:	Energie System 2050 Kollektive Nichtlineare Dynamik Komplexer Stromnetze Helmholtz Young Investigators Group "Efficiency, Emergence and Economics of future supply networks" Energiesystemtransformation
Link:	Get full text OpenAccess
	Publikationsportal JuSER

Please use the identifier: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23292-9 in citations.
Please use the identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/2128/27957 in citations.

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 demonstrate 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.