Cascade defense in urban road network by inserting modular topologies
Abstract
Purpose
By aiming at defending cascade failures effectively, the purpose of this paper is to present a strategy of inserting modular topologies into urban road network through reducing the burdens of critical components with too much traffic flow.
Design/methodology/approach
Each module is considered as a small-world random network, which is inserted into the initial Barabási-Albert scale-free network. Based on the user-equilibrium assignment, the strategy searches for remote nodes with low betweeness and flow in the network, and sets these nodes to be connected with the modular topologies. In this sense, the inserted modules are supposed to attach to the nodes with lower intensity of shorter path, and avoid bringing more impact to the nodes with higher betweeness and traffic flow. By using efficiency as the measurement of cascading failures, the performance of the networks generated through the strategy is tested.
Findings
The results show that the performance of the strategy is sensitive to the average degree of the inserted modular, and the modular size with a better effect on reducing the size of cascading failures or delaying the time of breakdown, while the other factors (e.g. the rewired probability) present few differences among various values. Meanwhile, it is found that the importance-based attachment mechanism has a better effect on preventing the cascading failures, especially delaying the step time of the larger reduction.
Practical implications
The strategy aims at alleviating the burdens in critical components to prevent the cascading failures of the network, and provides practical guidance on the decision of the urban road network evolving process.
Originality/value
An effective strategy for cascade defense in urban road network is proposed in this paper.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.51078165). The authors would like to thank anonymous referees for their helpful comments and valuable suggestions, which improves the content and composition substantially. Particularly the authors would like to thank Mr Xiang Xiaobao for the programming and computation.
Citation
Zou, Z., Wu, J., Gao, J. and Xu, X. (2014), "Cascade defense in urban road network by inserting modular topologies", Kybernetes, Vol. 43 No. 5, pp. 750-763. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-11-2013-0250
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited