The robustness of interdependent transportation networks under targeted attack

¹ School of Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications - Beijing 100876, China
² School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University - Beijing 100191, China
³ Science and Technology on Reliability and Environmental Engineering Laboratory - Beijing 100191, China
⁴ Beijing Key Laboratory for Cooperative Vehicle Infrastructure Systems and Safety Control, Beihang University Beijing 100191, China

^(a) daqingl@buaa.edu.cn
^(b) lugq@buaa.edu.cn

Received: 16 July 2013
Accepted: 13 September 2013

Abstract

The modern world is built on the robustness of interdependent infrastructures, which can be characterized as complex networks. Recently, a framework for the analysis of interdependent networks has been developed to explain the mechanism of robustness in interdependent networks. Here, we extend this interdependent network model by considering flows in the networks, and we study the system's robustness under different attack strategies. In our model, nodes may fail because of either overload or loss of interdependency. Considering the interaction between these two failure mechanisms, it is shown that interdependent scale-free networks show extreme vulnerability. The robustness of interdependent scale-free networks is found in our simulations to be much smaller than that of the single scale-free networks or the interdependent scale-free networks without flows.