https://towardsdatascience.com/thoughts-on-networks-communications-blockchains-and-a-space-age-internet-42a0cdf62a7d

Networks are an important way to visualize and quantify objects and their relationships with other objects. Particles exchanging photons with each other constitute a network. Companies with warehouses sending and storing freight carried by trucks, ships, and aircraft also constitute a network. Many interesting examples exist including television broadcasting, the food chain, consumer retail, and the power grid.

Businesses can be understood by considering networks that describe their operation. For example, oil wells are located in certain places that naturally occur, but oil or its derivatives are everywhere (gasoline and plastics, to name the major ones). It would be vastly inefficient to distribute oil from wells directly to people’s cars, for example. It’s easy to see this if you draw a geographical network where nodes are locations on a map and edges are the distances between locations. Then you can draw another graph on top, where new edges indicate oil pipelines and their capacities or distance. By adding up the “weights” of the edges, you can get a good idea of how expensive it would be to build your network of pipelines.