Universal behavior of cascading failures in interdependent networks

Significance Catastrophic events affecting technological or critical infrastructures are often originated by a cascading failure triggered by marginal perturbations, which are on their turn localized in one of the many interdependent graphs describing the systems. Understanding the robustness of these graphs is therefore of utmost importance for preventing crashes and/or for engineering more efficient and stalwart networked systems. Here we give a fresh framework by means of which cascading failures can be described in a very rich variety of dynamical models and/or topological network structures and which provides a series of quantitative answers able to predict the extent of the system’s failure.