Authors:Jichang Zhao, Daqing Li, Hillel Danhedrai, Roven Cohen and Shlomo Havlin
Published in:Nature Communications
Abstract:Different from the direct contact in epidemics spread, overload failures propagate through hidden functional dependencies. Many studies focused on the critical conditions and catastrophic consequences of cascading failures. However, to understand the network vulnerability and mitigate the cascading overload failures, the knowledge of how the failures propagate in time and space is essential but still missing. Here we study the spatio-temporal propagation behavior of cascading overload failures analytically and numerically. The cascading overload failures are found to spread radially from the center of the initial failure with an approximately constant velocity. The propagation velocity decreases with increasing tolerance, and can be well predicted by our theoretical framework with one single correction for all the tolerance values. This propagation velocity is found similar in various model networks and real network structures. Our findings may help to predict and mitigate the dynamics of cascading overload failures in realistic systems.
Keywords:Physics - Physics and Society
About the author:
Jichang Zhao received his B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Beihang University in 2008 and 2014 under supervision of Prof. Ke Xu. From 2012 to 2013, he visited the department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Israel as a joint Ph.D student supervised by Prof. Shlomo Havlin. He is currently an assistant professor at the School of Economics and Management, Beihang University. His research interests include online social media, complex networks and business intelligence.
