Cascade effects of load shedding in coupled networks

Abstract

Intricate webs of interlinked critical infrastructures such as electrical grid, telecommunication, and transportation are essential for the minimal functioning of contemporary societies and economies. Advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) underpin the increasing interconnectivity of these systems which created new vulnerabilities that can be affected by hardware failure, link cut, human error, natural disaster, physical-attacks and cyber-attacks. Failures of a fraction on nodes may possibly lead to failures of the dependent nodes in another network. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to investigate the cascades phenomena caused by load shedding between two interconnected networks using Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld sandpile modeling. We have found that, largest avalanche occurred when node degree and/interconnectivity link become dense. In addition, coupled random-regular networks tend to be more robust than the coupled Erdös-Rényi networks. However, coupled randomregular networks are vulnerable to random attack and coupled Erdös-Rényi networks are vulnerable to target attack due to the degree distribution.