Curtailing cascading failures
Abstract
Cascading behaviors are ubiquitous, from power-grid failures (1) to “flash crashes” in financial markets (2, 3) to the spread of political movements such as the “Arab Spring” (4). The causes of these cascades are varied with many unknowns, which make them extremely difficult to predict or contain. Particularly challenging are cascading failures that arise from the reorganization of flows on a network, such as in electric power grids, supply chains, and transportation networks. Here, the network edges (or “links”) have some fixed capacity, and we see that some small disturbances easily dampen out, but other seemingly similar ones lead to massive failures. On page 886 of this issue, Yang et al. (5) establish that a small “vulnerable set” of components in the power grid is implicated in large-scale outages. Although the exact elements in this set vary with operating conditions, they reveal intriguing correlations with network structure.
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References and Notes
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Science
Volume 358 | Issue 6365
17 November 2017
17 November 2017
Copyright
Copyright © 2017, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
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Published in print: 17 November 2017
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for support from Army Research Office Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant W911NF-13-1-0340, Army Research Laboratory grant W911NF-09-2-0053, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant W911NF-17-10077.
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