Recovery of Interdependent Networks

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 6; no. 1; p. 22834
• Main Authors: Di Muro, M A, La Rocca, C E, Stanley, H E, Havlin, S, Braunstein, L A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Nature Publishing Group 09.03.2016
• Subjects: Breakdowns; Nodes
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/srep22834

Recent network research has focused on the cascading failures in a system of interdependent networks and the necessary preconditions for system collapse. An important question that has not been addressed is how to repair a failing system before it suffers total breakdown. Here we introduce a recovery strategy for nodes and develop an analytic and numerical framework for studying the concurrent failure and recovery of a system of interdependent networks based on an efficient and practically reasonable strategy. Our strategy consists of repairing a fraction of failed nodes, with probability of recovery γ, that are neighbors of the largest connected component of each constituent network. We find that, for a given initial failure of a fraction 1 - p of nodes, there is a critical probability of recovery above which the cascade is halted and the system fully restores to its initial state and below which the system abruptly collapses. As a consequence we find in the plane γ - p of the phase diagram three distinct phases. A phase in which the system never collapses without being restored, another phase in which the recovery strategy avoids the breakdown, and a phase in which even the repairing process cannot prevent system collapse.