Vulnerability Assessment of Interdependent Power and Communications Networks under Varying Level of Interdependency

Abstract

Maintaining a continuous and robust supply of power could be challenging task, because power networks depend on proper communication to coordinate and schedule supply, as well as recognize and mitigate failures; communication networks depend on power to function. This interdependency is a cause for greater failure risks due to the rapid cascading of failures from one network to the other. The objective of this work is to investigate the vulnerability of interdependent networks under various scenarios and coupling assumptions. To do so, we employ heuristic techniques to detect critical nodes in either network which lead to the maximum number of failed nodes in the interdependent networks. We put to the test a series of topographical importance metrics to heuristically identify said important nodes and compare our results with the literature. Furthermore, we test different coupling methods for how interdependency works and compare the results under different failure assumptions.