Effects of the cascading failures on scale-free traffic networks

In this paper, we consider the artificial scale-free traffic network with dynamic weights (cost) and focus on how the removal strategies (flow-based removal, betweenness-based removal and mix-based removal) affect the damage of cascading failures based on the user-equilibrium (UE) assignment, which ensures the balance of flow on the traffic network. Experiment simulation shows that different removal strategies can bring large dissimilarities of the efficiency and damage after the intentional removal of an edge. We show that the mix-based removal of a single edge might reduce the damage of cascading failures and delay the breakdown time, especially for larger reserve capacity coefficient alpha. This is particularly important for real-world networks with a highly hetereogeneous distribution of flow, i.e., traffic and transportation networks, logistics networks and electrical power grids. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.