Failures in Power Grids: Dynamically Induced Cascades

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A reliable functioning of technical infrastructure networks is essential for our modern, high-tech society. Cascading failures, i.e. chain reactions of failures of different infrastructures, are the cause of many failures of entire networks, e.g. large parts of the European power grids. Although cascading failures are usually influenced by network-wide nonlinear dynamics between the individual failures, their modelling has so far concentrated primarily on the analysis of sequences of failure events of individual infrastructures - however, the dynamics between these events have not been taken into account.

In an article now published by Nature Communications, an analysis scheme is presented which takes into account the event-based character of the chain reaction as well as the specific network dynamic influences.