Extreme risk induced by communities in interdependent networks

Abstract

Networks in nature not only depend on each other but also have internal community structures, such as infrastructure networks with links within and across geographic regions. The communities play an important role when the networks undergo localized failures in specific regions, for instance when natural disasters or economic sanctions disrupt a local community region and consequently influence the whole system. How a disruption in one community propagates through the entire system is a crucial, but still open, question. Here we find that the community structure embeds extreme risk: weakening the community strength could abruptly drive the system to a precarious state. Examining the business-flight network among cities as a proxy for the world economy, we find this real coupled system evolving towards the extreme vulnerable phase due to ongoing globalization. This shows the community risk indeed exists in real world networks and deserves more attention from the scientific community.