TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kaiser, Franz
AU  - Latora, Vito
AU  - Witthaut, Dirk
TI  - Network isolators inhibit failure spreading in complex networks
JO  - Nature Communications
VL  - 12
IS  - 1
SN  - 2041-1723
CY  - [London]
PB  - Nature Publishing Group UK
M1  - FZJ-2021-02373
SP  - 3143
PY  - 2021
AB  - 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.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - 34035263
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000658774600015
DO  - DOI:10.1038/s41467-021-23292-9
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/892833
ER  -