Suppressing cascades in a self-organized-critical model with non-contiguous spread of failures

Heiko Hoffmann and David W. Payton

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2014, vol. 67, issue C, 87-93

Abstract: Many complex systems that produce cascading events are thought to be self-organized critical (SOC). So far, models of SOC treat a cascade as a spread strictly between adjacent nodes, while in many real systems, e.g., the power-grid or the brain, this restriction is invalid. Here, we demonstrate for the first time SOC behavior in a model for which the spread is non-contiguous, i.e., not restricted to neighboring nodes. We illustrate our results in a circuit model obeying Kirchhoff’s laws and demonstrate mitigation strategies that avoid large-scale cascades. We found that the following two unconventional strategies break SOC: (1) upgrade lines at random in addition to fixing failures and (2) upgrade a tripped line with one that has a random trip threshold. These results enhance our understanding about the conditions under which SOC can occur and may lead to insights that help avoid catastrophic events in real-world systems.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077914001064
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:67:y:2014:i:c:p:87-93

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2014.06.011

Access Statistics for this article

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is currently edited by Stefano Boccaletti and Stelios Bekiros

More articles in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thayer, Thomas R. ().