Robustness of Trans-European Gas Networks

TL;DR

This study analyzes the robustness of the trans-European gas pipeline network, revealing its dual-purpose design for efficiency and error tolerance, and demonstrating its resilience to failures of high load links.

Contribution

It introduces a combined topological and flow-based analysis to evaluate the network's load and fault tolerance, highlighting its inherent robustness.

Findings

The network is highly efficient with many shortest paths crossing major pipelines.

The network maintains capacity despite non-operational pipelines, indicating error tolerance.

The pipeline network is robust against failures of high load links.

Abstract

Here we uncover the load and fault-tolerant backbones of the trans-European gas pipeline network. Combining topological data with information on inter-country flows, we estimate the global load of the network and its tolerance to failures. To do this, we apply two complementary methods generalized from the betweenness centrality and the maximum flow. We find that the gas pipeline network has grown to satisfy a dual-purpose: on one hand, the major pipelines are crossed by a large number of shortest paths thereby increasing the efficiency of the network; on the other hand, a non-operational pipeline causes only a minimal impact on network capacity, implying that the network is error-tolerant. These findings suggest that the trans-European gas pipeline network is robust, i.e., error tolerant to failures of high load links.