Curtailing cascading failures
The failure of a small but variable set of links can bring down a supply network
Abstract
Cascading behaviors are ubiquitous, from power-grid failures (1) to “flash crashes” in financial markets (2, 3) to the spread of political movements such as the “Arab Spring” (4). The causes of these cascades are varied with many unknowns, which make them extremely difficult to predict or contain. Particularly challenging are cascading failures that arise from the reorganization of flows on a network, such as in electric power grids, supply chains, and transportation networks. Here, the network edges (or “links”) have some fixed capacity, and we see that some small disturbances easily dampen out, but other seemingly similar ones lead to massive failures. On page 886 of this issue, Yang et al. (5) establish that a small “vulnerable set” of components in the power grid is implicated in large-scale outages. Although the exact elements in this set vary with operating conditions, they reveal intriguing correlations with network structure.
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References and Notes
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Science
Volume 358 | Issue 6365
17 November 2017
17 November 2017
Copyright
Copyright © 2017, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
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Published in print: 17 November 2017
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for support from Army Research Office Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant W911NF-13-1-0340, Army Research Laboratory grant W911NF-09-2-0053, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant W911NF-17-10077.
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- Raissa M. D'Souza
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Next to simulation - Designing networks
D'Souza described propagation of risk along cascading, and she introduced the development of a simulation framework to prevent "flash crashes" (1).
In 2011, electricity supply in East Japan became insufficient, due to the Great East Japan Earthquake and the nuclear accident in Fukushima. The frequency of electricity differs between East Japan (50 Hz) and West Japan (60 Hz), so frequency conversion equipment was a bottleneck to transfer electric power (2). In this case, flash crash will be suppressed, but availability is compromised and the modularization of the network caused delay in flow as a harmful effect. Meanwhile, blocking is one of effective countermeasures like the trading curb (circuit breaker) on the stock market (3). Depending on the size of the module and the centrality of the module, the bottleneck can be both a countermeasure and an obstacle.
Nowadays, the European Union is planning e-Highway2050 (4), which is not considering energy flow but also storage. In the future works, simulation and real results are expected to develop optimum module designs of networks with countermeasures of disconnection, delay, waiting (storage savings) to keep the availability.
References:
1. R. M. D'Souza, Science (80-. ). 358, 860LP–861 (2017).
2. A. Gordenker, Japan's incompatible power grids. The Japan Times (2011), (available at https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2011/07/19/reference/japans-incompatib...).
3. Trading curb. Wikipedia (2017), (available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_curb).
4. e-highway2050 (2017), (available at http://www.e-highway2050.eu/e-highway2050/).