Modeling and analysis of cascading failure in directed complex networks

Abstract

This paper exploited the cascading failure behavior in the new context of directed complex networks by introducing the concept of neighbor links. Two novel network attack strategies, i.e. the minimum in-degree attack strategy (MIAS) and the maximum out-degree attack strategy (MOAS), are proposed and their impacts are assessed through simulation experiments by using the random attack strategy (RAS) as the comparison benchmark for a range of network scenarios (directed random network, directed scale-free network and the IEEE 118 network model). The numerical result shows that the cascading failure propagation in directed complex networks is highly dependent on the attack strategies and the directionality of the network, as well as other network configurations.