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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 6: Mobility, Traffic Dynamics, Urban and Regional Systems
SOE 6.4: Talk
Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 11:45–12:00, GÖR/0226
Higher-order interactions yield synergistic infrastructure backbones — •Christoph Steinacker1, Henrik Wolf2, Marc Timme1, and Malte Schröder1 — 1Chair of Network Dynamics, Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed) and Institute of Theoretical Physics, TUD Dresden University of Technology, 01062 Dresden, Germany — 2AMOLF, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Infrastructure networks essentially underlie human mobility across all modes of transport. Higher-order interactions among different network elements impact network performance as they generically induce modified usage at every element across the network. Here, we consider such higher-order interactions to reveal and quantify the synergies between different link upgrades in transport networks. While network expansion strategies based on first-order, individual link importance result in scattered, disconnected networks, sets of pairs of mutually synergistic links automatically form connected backbones of infrastructure networks. We illustrate the approach with a perturbed utility route choice model for bicycle traffic on empirical urban street networks. Our results not only provide a novel theory of evaluating complex transport networks beyond individual link importance, they may also help to guide strategic network planning in practice.
Keywords: higher-order networks; active mobility; network structure