Precursors and prediction of catastrophic avalanches

TL;DR

This paper reviews various failure models to identify precursors that signal imminent catastrophic avalanches, highlighting how growing correlations can predict system failures in advance.

Contribution

It provides a comparative review of precursor parameters across multiple failure models, emphasizing their role in predicting global failure points.

Findings

Precursor parameters reflect increasing correlations before failure.

Precursors can often predict failure points in advance.

Different models exhibit distinct precursor behaviors.

Abstract

In this work we review the precursors of catastrophic avalanches (global failures) in several failure models, namely (a) Fiber Bundle Model (FBM), (b) Random Fuse Model (RFM), (c) Sandpile Models and (d) Fractal Overlap Model. The precursor parameters identified here essentially reflect the growing correlations within such systems as they approach their respective failure points. As we show, often they help us to predict the global failure points in advance.