Sequential Recovery of Complex Networks Suffering From Cascading Failure Blackouts

Over the past decades, prevention and mitigation against cascading failure blackouts in complex networked systems have been extensively studied. In reality, the functional and structural restoration of complex networks suffering from large-scale cascading failures may involve a sequence of repairing actions. In this paper, we propose a novel sequential recovery model that takes into consideration both the operating mechanism of complex power transmission networks and potential cascading failures triggered during the recovery process. From a complex network perspective, we introduce a new tool called the sequential recovery graph (SRG) to identify the critical nodes and the order of their restorations which lead to better performance in the recovery process. We further develop a practical sequential recovery strategy based on SRG. We perform simulations on three benchmark power grids and five baseline methods for performance comparison. Simulation results and complexity analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and low computational complexity of the proposed SRG-based strategy.