Research on cascading failure modes and attack strategies of multimodal transport network

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Cascading failure overall exists in practical network, which poses a risk of causing significant losses. Studying the effect of different cascading failure modes and attack strategies of the network is conducive to more effectively controlling the network. In the present study, the uniqueness of multimodal transport network is investigated by complying with the percolation theory, and a cascading failure model is built for the multimodal transport network by considering recovery mechanisms and dynamics. Under the three failure modes, i.e., node failure, edge failure and node-edge failure, nine attack strategies are formulated, consisting of random node attacking strategy (RNAS), high-degree attacking strategy (HDAS), high-closeness attacking strategy (HCAS), random edge attacking strategy (REAS), high-importance attacking strategy (HIAS1), high-importance attacking strategy (HIAS2), random node-edge attacking strategy (RN-EAS), high degree-importance1 attacking strategy (HD-I1AS), as well as high closeness-importance2 attacking strategy (HC-I2AS). The effect of network cascading failure is measured at the scale of the affected network that varies with the failure ratio and the network connectivity varying with the step. By conducting a simulation analysis, the results of the two indicators are compared; it is suggested that under the three failure modes, the attack strategies exhibiting high node closeness as the indicator always poses more effective damage to the network. Next, a sensitivity analysis is conducted, and it is concluded that HCAS is the most effective attack strategy. Accordingly, the subsequent study on the cascading failure of multimodal transport network should start with the nodes exhibiting high closeness to optimize the network.</p>