Enhancing the robustness of planar spatial networks

Spatial networks cover a large number of important infrastructures such as railways, roads and distribution systems of various kinds. The integrity of these infrastructures is very important for society. Methods for improving the robustness of spatial planar networks are suggested based on adding new links to the networks under the hard constraint that the total added link length is less than a small percentage of the original length. The strategies are first applied to model spatial networks by using numerical simulations for the attacks and failures and the results are satisfactory in terms of the robustness of the modified networks compared to the original ones. The methodology is then applied to two actual spatial networks of the transportation type with equally good results. We conclude that the proposed heuristic strategy is a useful one in this context and can also be applied to actual networks.