The Waiting-Time Distribution for Network Partitions in Cascading Failures in Power Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how network redundancy influences the timing and size of network partitions during cascading failures in power networks, revealing systematic shifts in waiting-time distributions with increased redundancy.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic analysis of waiting-time distributions for network partitions in power networks, highlighting the impact of network redundancy on cascading failure dynamics.

Findings

Waiting-time distributions shift right with increased redundancy.

Largest partition sizes decrease as redundancy increases.

Results are consistent across synthetic and real power networks.

Abstract

Network redundancy is one of the spatial network structural properties critical to robustness against cascading failures in power networks. The waiting-time distributions for network partitions in cascading failures explain how the spatial network structures affect the cascading behaviors. Two waiting time events associated with the first and largest network partitions are studied for cascading failures under different network redundancies. With the synthetic power networks, the waiting-time distributions of network partitions can be systematically analyzed for various network redundancies. Waiting-time distributions shift to the right accordingly when network redundancies increase. Meanwhile, the sizes of the largest partitions decrease while the numbers of them increase statistically. The realistic power networks of France, Texas, and Poland also show the same trend for waiting-time distributions.