Introduction to the minitrack on self-organized criticality

Abstract

Many large complex systems seem to exhibit evidence of self-organized criticality. Examples range from the much-studied sandpiles to the Internet. The minitrack includes five papers focused on such behavior in the bulk electric power system. Two of the papers analyze data for large disturbances in the power system gathered by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) for the years 1984 through 1999. The authors conclude that the data is consistent with the power system being a self-organized critical system. Three of the papers introduce Markov processes or models into the power network environment to capture the process of selforganization or occurrence of cascading outages. Although the availability of the NERC data makes the bulk power system a convenient exemplar for major system events it is assumed that these models will form a basis for the study on major disturbances in many networks. The ultimate goal is the design and operation of large networks so they are more immune to such failures.