Abnormal dynamics of cascading edge failures with congestion effect

Abstract

Considering congestion effects in realistic network environments, we give a new method to adjust dynamically adjust the weight of the congested edge. We calculate the load on an edge based on the revised betweenness method and propose a novel model with three states of edges to investigate the dynamics of cascading failures in the ring network, the BA scale-free network, and the real traffic networks in London. By two robust metrics, we surprisingly observe the abnormal dynamics of cascading propagation, especially compared with that in the unadjustable weight, the curves of cascading dynamics in the adjustable weight are more irregular, which means that enhancing the capacity of each edge is not always better to avoid the cascading propagation. In addition, our simulation results show that the dynamical change of the edge’s weight makes the heterogeneous BA networks more vulnerable.