Evaluation of Cascading Infrastructure Failures and Optimal Recovery from a Network Science Perspective

This chapter reviews the network science literature in order to create a hypothesis for the recovery of infrastructure systems. We depict the cascade of infrastructure systems through networks and simulate perturbations within a singular topology and discuss how those impact multiple layers of an interconnected network. The simulation compares and contrasts the proposed recovery methods in the literature alongside true-to-life recovery, based upon case studies throughout the United States. We explore the limitations of imposing a recovery algorithm at various points in time during infrastructure failure. This chapter aims to provide resources that account for a quantitative approach to cascading infrastructure failures, as well as accounting for human nature, politics, perceptions, and communication that may prove to be hurdles to optimizing recovery.