Cascading failures in anisotropic interdependent networks of spatial modular structures

Abstract

The structure of real-world multilayer infrastructure systems usually exhibits anisotropy due to constraints of the embedding space. For example, geographical features like mountains, rivers and shores influence the architecture of critical infrastructure networks. Moreover, such spatial networks are often non-homogeneous but rather have a modular structure with dense connections within communities and sparse connections between neighboring communities. When the networks of the different layers are interdependent, local failures and attacks may propagate throughout the system. Here we study the robustness of spatial interdependent networks which are both anisotropic and heterogeneous. We also evaluate the effect of localized attacks having different geometrical shapes. We find that anisotropic networks are more robust against localized attacks and that anisotropic attacks, surprisingly, even on isotropic structures, are more effective than isotropic attacks.

References in corpus (7)

• Uncovering the overlapping community structure of complex networks in nature and society
• The structure and dynamics of multilayer networks
• Avoiding catastrophic failure in correlated networks of networks
• Percolation in real interdependent networks
• Percolation of localized attack on complex networks
• Structural properties of spatially embedded networks
• Cascading Failures in Interdependent Networks with Multiple Supply-Demand Links and Functionality Thresholds