Resilience to cascading failures. a complex network approach for analysing the Croatian power grid

摘要

A transmission power grid system is arguably the single most important utility of any nation since it provides a basic infrastructure for a wide variety of interconnected and interdependent systems of vital importance. Therefore, its resilience to intentional attacks or random failures is of critical importance. This is especially true with respect to cascading failures which can be initiated by seemingly minor events but can lead to economic losses worth billions of dollars, as recent examples show. In order to gain insight into the resilience of the Croatian transmission power grid we investigated its resilience to three different types of failures, including both intentional attacks and random failures. Our analyses are based on the complex network approach. Extensive numerical simulations were carried out based on three different discrete-time cascading failure models. The first two models were described previously, whereas we substantially modified the third model.