  We introduce the concept of self-healing in the field of complex networks.
Obvious applications range from infrastructural to technological networks. By
exploiting the presence of redundant links in recovering the connectivity of
the system, we introduce self-healing capabilities through the application of
distributed communication protocols granting the "smartness" of the system. We
analyze the interplay between redundancies and smart reconfiguration protocols
in improving the resilience of networked infrastructures to multiple failures;
in particular, we measure the fraction of nodes still served for increasing
levels of network damages. We study the effects of different connectivity
patterns (planar square-grids, small-world, scale-free networks) on the healing
performances. The study of small-world topologies shows us that the
introduction of some long-range connections in the planar grids greatly
enhances the resilience to multiple failures giving results comparable to the
most resilient (but less realistic) scale-free structures.
