Modeling Cascading Failures in Interdependent Systems: A Framework for Infrastructure and Health Co-Resilience Advances Integrated Risk Science

A comprehensive modeling framework addressing cascading failures across interdependent infrastructure and health systems has entered active deployment, advancing the Academy’s effort to formalize co-resilience as a central construct in complex risk science.

The framework is designed to examine how disruptions originating in energy, water, transportation, or communication networks propagate into healthcare delivery, population exposure, and community stability. Rather than treating infrastructure performance and health outcomes as separate domains, the initiative establishes a coupled analytical architecture linking technical systems with biological vulnerability and social response.

Developed within the scientific framework of The Americas Academy of Sciences, the effort integrates analytical capabilities across the Academy’s domains to construct multilevel representations of cascading impact pathways.

Engineering and Applied Sciences lead the development of network-based simulations capturing load redistribution, service degradation, and recovery dynamics across critical infrastructure. Medicine and Life Sciences integrate clinical capacity indicators, care continuity metrics, and population health sensitivity profiles, enabling translation of technical failures into health burden projections. Natural Sciences contribute hazard timing, environmental exposure, and climate stress inputs to contextualize cascading sequences. Social and Behavioral Sciences analyze institutional coordination, risk communication, and household adaptation under service disruption, while Humanities and Transcultural Studies provide historical perspective on systemic breakdowns and recovery practices across prior technological transitions.

Together, these components form an integrated modeling environment linking physical networks with human outcomes.

“This framework advances our understanding of resilience as a coupled property of infrastructure and health,” the Academy stated in its official communication. “By modeling cascading failures across technical and biological systems, we are strengthening the scientific foundations for anticipating compound impacts and designing more integrated resilience strategies.”

Initial implementation focuses on harmonizing infrastructure inventories with healthcare utilization data, defining standardized co-resilience indicators, and deploying scenario-based simulations to explore alternative restoration strategies following large-scale disruption. The framework also introduces multi-layer dependency analysis, enabling identification of critical nodes whose protection or rapid recovery yields disproportionate benefit for population well-being.

Outputs from this effort are structured to inform subsequent Academy syntheses on compound risk, emergency response optimization, and long-term system adaptation. Methodological advances include coupling agent-based behavioral models with network flow simulations and integrating uncertainty quantification across interdependent domains.

In parallel, the initiative provides a collaborative research and training environment for early-career scientists, fostering interdisciplinary competencies in systems engineering, health analytics, and integrative risk modeling.

The advancement of this cascading failure and co-resilience framework marks a substantive expansion of the Academy’s complex systems science portfolio. By embedding infrastructure dynamics within population health and social context, the Academy continues to advance rigorous, interdisciplinary approaches to understanding how modern societies absorb shock, reorganize, and recover amid increasing systemic interdependence.