Robustness of spontaneous cascading dynamics driven by reachable area

Abstract Different from the previous research framework of cascading failure driven by intentional attack or random failure, this paper considers the occurrence of cascading failure from a new perspective, i.e., the spontaneous phenomenon of cascading failure. When the network changes from the low peak period to the high peak period, the global distribution of load changes, which leads to the cascading failure of the network. This phenomenon is called the spontaneous phenomenon of cascading failure. We introduce the concept of reachable region and construct a new cascading failure model, which mainly focus on how the dynamic changes of reachable area drive the dynamic behavior of cascade failures. Through simulation on two infrastructure networks, we found that: (1) The size of reachable area is positively correlated with network robustness. The larger the reachable area is, the smaller the load fluctuation of the whole network is, and the cascading failures are more easily alleviated and the network robustness is higher. But when the edge load capacity increases, the robustness of the network is not necessarily improved, which indicates the existence of capacity paradox. (2) The size of reachable area is negatively correlated with network capacity redundancy. The larger the reachable area is, the lower the capacity redundancy of the whole network will be and the less network resources will be wasted. (3) Combining with the network topology and the phenomenon of “key edge” we find that the edge with less betweenness centrality usually needs to invest higher resource protection.