Reliability and controllability of infrastructure networks : do they match?

Reliability-based design principles for infrastructure systems continue advancing in engineering practice, but it is unclear whether and how these principles support emerging topological controllability (TC) requirements in the context of smart systems. This paper takes an initial step to evaluate the correlation between connectivity reliability (CR) and topological controllability (TC). Taking six city-level power transmission networks and thousands of artificial networks—generated from the original power transmission networks—this paper reveals that a dense and homogeneous network topology is better to satisfy CR and TC requirements, than more common sparse and heterogeneous networks when node attributes are not considered explicitly. Also, high degree nodes are found to rank high in terms of both CR and TC. However, when node attributes are accounted for, the reliability-based node importance measure for generators may underestimate some important nodes in terms of TC, and vice versa—an issue not observed for substation nodes. Hence, the findings in this paper suggest a potential new direction to enhance reliability-based design by integrating it with controllability based measures that will be relevant as infrastructure networks evolve into more intensive information-based systems.