Michael M. Danziger & Albert-László Barabási
Nature Communications volume 13, Article number: 955 (2022)

The increased complexity of infrastructure systems has resulted in critical interdependencies between multiple networks—communication systems require electricity, while the normal functioning of the power grid relies on communication systems. These interdependencies have inspired an extensive literature on coupled multilayer networks, assuming a hard interdependence, where a component failure in one network causes failures in the other network, resulting in a cascade of failures across multiple systems. While empirical evidence of such hard failures is limited, the repair and recovery of a network requires resources typically supplied by other networks, resulting in documented interdependencies induced by the recovery process. In this work, we explore recovery coupling, capturing the dependence of the recovery of one system on the instantaneous functional state of another system. If the support networks are not functional, recovery will be slowed. Here we collected…