Effect of network topologies and attacking strategies on cascading failure model with power-law load redistribution

Abstract

Various traffic networks play an important role in daily life and have different topological characteristics such as small-world and scale-free. The factors of traffic congestion, natural disasters and traffic accidents may induce cascading failure in which the load redistribution usually has the characteristic of power-law (that is to say, when a station is broken, the great majority of passengers would evacuate to the nearby stations, but the very few would evacuate to further). Based on them, this paper studies the load-capacity cascading failure model with power-law load redistribution using three kinds of attacking strategies (removing a single node according to the load, removing multiple nodes according to the load and removing multiple nodes randomly) for different network structures (random networks, WS small-world networks and BA scale-free networks). We confirm the robustness of our results by further performing simulations on real-world traffic networks. A quantitative description of network topologies and attacking strategies vs. the cascading failure model with power-law load redistribution is obtained by computer simulation. The results demonstrate that in contrast to removing the node according to the load, network robustness increases with the increase of the load control parameter α when randomly removing the node; when θ is small, the load tolerance parameter β is sensitive to the network robustness in random networks and WS small-world networks when removing a single node according to the load.