Inflicting cascade of failures in interdependent networks

Abstract

Interdependent networks are emerging in the critical infrastructures such as telecommunication and internet networks, electrical smart grids, transportation networks, and many more. There are advantages of introducing interdependency into critical infrastructures to enhance the functional and operational capability. On the other hand, there is a critical tradeoff which is the cascading failures that propagate from one network to another network. The occurrence of this phenomena will cause major catastrophe to our lives that is hugely dependent on such critical infrastructure. Thus, there is a need to understand how cascading failures are spreading in interdependent networks and the sensitive factors that have a severe impact on these phenomena. In this paper, we have developed a cascade model to describe and quantify the effects of cascading failures in interdependent networks using Sandpile dynamic models as load distribution. The extensive analysis and numerical results have shown that the increase of interdependency links can enlarge the global cascade probability from one network to another network. In addition, the failures that triggered from a dense network can cause more severe damage to another network than the failures triggered from a sparse network.