Designing Interdependent Networks against Cascading Failures with Node Protections

We study the optimal design of interdependent networks against cascading failures with node protections. Different from existing literature which only considers the interdependency link design, we also take node protection strategy into account, where the attacked nodes have a fixed probability of surviving. The system designer is armed with finite protection resources and wants to maximize the number of survival nodes after initial attacks and subsequent cascading failures. Based on well-adopted analytical models for cascading networks, we propose optimal and near-optimal interdependent network designs for several node protection strategies. The one-to-one structure with complete interdependency and partial interdependency, together with the one-to-many structure, are considered. Numerical simulations are carried out to support the theoretical results.