Learning Failure Propagation Patterns in Interdependent Network From Observed Post-Disaster Disruptions

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This project is to develop models and tools to uncover the failure cascading process, or how failures of an initial, small set of nodes propagate through interdependent networks as it happened in the real world. Recent disasters such as blackouts in the United States and Canada and the 2012 Hurricane Sandy have repeatedly shown the effects on society resulting from cascading failures between interdependent critical infrastructures. This research addresses a fundamental challenge in building toward our next-generation resilient critical infrastructures: what kinds of interdependencies within and across systems will facilitate or mitigate a potential failure cascading process. This project will also provide a critical opportunity to develop a methodological class that combines knowledge from multiple fields. The modules developed in the course will be widely disseminated through the project website. Outreach activities will focus on under-represented minority students, as well as an advisory team comprising practitioners in disaster/emergency response. This project will utilize novel geostatistical and statistical approaches that will allow the PIs to estimate disaster disruptions at a fine spatial scale and identify a sequence of events replicating the failure propagation process using empirical data collected before and after a disaster. It will also use independent datasets, reports and informal qualitative interviews to statistically validate and contextualize the numerical model results. This project builds on a solid intellectual and methodological foundation resulting from our previous studies as well as the most recent developments in advanced statistics, general network science, and infrastructure interdependency. The research has the potential to bring transformative changes across multiple fields.