A Community-Structure-Based Method for Estimating the Fractal Dimension, and its Application to Water Networks for the Assessment of Vulnerability to Disasters

Most real-world networks, from the World-Wide-Web to biological systems, are known to have common structural properties. A remarkable point is fractality, which suggests the self-similarity across scales of the network structure of these complex systems. Managing the computational complexity for detecting the self-similarity of big-sized systems represents a crucial problem. In this paper, a novel algorithm for revealing the fractality, that exploits the community structure principle, is proposed and then applied to several water distribution systems (WDSs) of different size, unveiling a self-similar feature of their layouts. A scaling-law relationship, linking the number of clusters necessary for covering the network and their average size is defined, the exponent of which represents the fractal dimension. The self-similarity is then investigated as a proxy of recurrent and specific response to multiple random pipe failures – like during natural disasters – pointing out a specific global vulnerability for each WDS. A novel vulnerability index, called Cut-Vulnerability is introduced as the ratio between the fractal dimension and the average node degree, and its relationships with the number of randomly removed pipes necessary to disconnect the network and with some topological metrics are investigated. The analysis shows the effectiveness of the novel index in describing the global vulnerability of WDSs.