Cascading Critical Nodes Detection with Load Redistribution in Complex Systems

In complex networked systems, the failures of a few critical components will cause a large cascade of component failures because of operational dependencies between components, resulting in the breakdown of the network. Therefore, it is crucial to identify these critical nodes in the study of complex network vulnerability under cascading failure. Unfortunately, we show that this problem is NP-hard to be approximated within a ratio of \(O(n^{1-\epsilon })\). Accordingly, we design two approaches to solve this problem. The first one estimates the cascading potential of each node while the second one measures the cooperated impact of node failures under an ordered attack. Since smart-grids is an important complex networked infrastructure, we also demonstrate some safety setting for power grids using the designed algorithms.

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