Research on Key Fragile Dependency Links Removal Strategies in Interdependent Power and Communication Networks under Cascading Failures

In interdependent power and communication networks, the failure of a few nodes may cause large-scale cascading failures of the whole networks, and the fragile dependency links connecting central nodes at different layers are one of the important reasons for such cascading failures. Therefore, this paper aims to improve the robustness of the networks against cascading failures by removing key fragile dependency links. First, a realistic cascading model is constructed considering the heterogeneity of topology and load flow in the power and communication layers. Different parameters characterizing the node centrality are defined to assess the fragility of dependency links from the structural and robustness perspectives, and then different key fragile dependency links removal strategies are designed. Simulation results show that compared with the random dependency links removal strategy, key fragile dependency links removal strategies can remove fewer dependency links and make the networks more robust. Moreover, the key fragile dependency links removal strategy designed from the robustness perspective can perform better than the strategy designed from the structural perspective only.