Analysis of network cascading failure based on the cluster aggregation in cyber-physical systems

A cascading failure is a phenomenon in which the failure of one or several nodes triggers the failure of other nodes. In cyber-physical systems, the failure propagation of edge information adversely affects the network performance. Past research on cascade failure has primarily focused on the node distribution but has ignored the influence of the edges on the cascading failure and network stability. In addition, research is lacking on the internal connections of nodes and edges and the role of the constituent topology. In this paper, a cascading failure model that considers different types of nodes and edges and their contribution to the network is developed and analyzed based on cluster aggregation in cyber-physical systems. The topological changes in the networks after multiple aggregations of clusters during a cascading failure are described. The relative capacity of the flow of the edges is proposed to determine the importance rank of the network elements, and the integrated transfer efficiency of the network is used to assess the performance. The model can detect the most important nodes, edges, and critical failure paths. These factors are of great significance for adjusting the topology of the network or designing new networks. Examples of networks are used to demonstrate the proposed method.