Failure tolerance of load-bearing hierarchical networks.

We investigate the statistics and dynamics of failure in a two-dimensional load-bearing network with branching hierarchical structure, and its variants. The variants strengthen the original lattice by using connectivity strategies which add new sites to the maximal cluster in top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top versions. We study the load-bearing capacity and the failure tolerance of all versions, as well as that of the strongest realization of the original lattice, the V lattice. The average number of failures as a function of the test load shows power-law behavior with power 5/2 for the V lattice, but sigmoidal behavior for all other versions. Thus the V lattice turns out to be the critical case of the load-bearing lattices. The distribution of failures is Gaussian for the original lattice, the V lattice, and the bottom-to-top strategy, but is non-Gaussian for the top-to-bottom one. The bottom-to-top strategy leads to stable and strong lattices, and can resist failure even when tested with weights which greatly exceed the capacity of its backbone. We also examine the behavior of asymmetric lattices and discover that the mean failure rates are minimized if the probability of connection p is symmetric with respect to both neighbors. Our results can be of relevance in the context of realistic networks.