Cascading Failures Due to WMD Attack on Realistic Heterogeneous Infrastructure Networks
Abstract
Real infrastructures are neither isotropic nor homogeneous, but correlate well with population density that is highly non uniform and concentrates in large cities or spread along a sea coast, rivers, or major transportation routes. Our preliminary results indicate that temporal and spatial characteristics of the cascading failures spreading on heterogeneous infrastructures are dramatically different from spreading on uniform infrastructures studied earlier. Thus, taking into consideration heterogeneous geographical features of real infrastructures we will develop analytic and computer simulation methodologies to study cascading failures due to WMD attacks on real infrastructures. We will study cascading failures due to different mechanisms of failure of individual elements, including dependency, lack of connections, and overloads. The initial attacks are assumed to be either localized, i.e. eliminating all nodes and links within certain area like radiation and a shock wave of a low altitude atomic explosion, or spread over the entire territory like an electromagnetic pulse caused by a high altitude atomic explosion. Finally, we will build accurate models real infrastructures such as transportation networks and power grids, using data from the existing databases. As a result, we will assess the robustness and resilience of real infrastructures against various types of WMD attacks.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2019
- Source ID
- HDTRA11910016
Entities
People
- Andrei Ruckenstein
Organizations
- Boston University
- Defense Threat Reduction Agency