Prediction of Cascading Failures in Spatial Networks

PLoS One. 2016 Apr 19;11(4):e0153904. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0153904. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Cascading overload failures are widely found in large-scale parallel systems and remain a major threat to system reliability; therefore, they are of great concern to maintainers and managers of different systems. Accurate cascading failure prediction can provide useful information to help control networks. However, for a large, gradually growing network with increasing complexity, it is often impractical to explore the behavior of a single node from the perspective of failure propagation. Fortunately, overload failures that propagate through a network exhibit certain spatial-temporal correlations, which allows the study of a group of nodes that share common spatial and temporal characteristics. Therefore, in this study, we seek to predict the failure rates of nodes in a given group using machine-learning methods. We simulated overload failure propagations in a weighted lattice network that start with a center attack and predicted the failure percentages of different groups of nodes that are separated by a given distance. The experimental results of a feedforward neural network (FNN), a recurrent neural network (RNN) and support vector regression (SVR) all show that these different models can accurately predict the similar behavior of nodes in a given group during cascading overload propagation.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computer Simulation
  • Machine Learning
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Reproducibility of Results

Grants and funding

The authors have no support or funding to report.