Speaker:
William Liu

Date(s):
04 Sep 2012 to 04 Sep 2012

Topic:

Intricate webs of interlinked critical infrastructures such as electricity, telecommunications, transportation, public health and water supply networks, are essential for the minimal functioning of contemporary societies and economies.   Advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) underpin the increasing interdependence of these systems and this interdependence has created new vulnerabilities to networked equipment failure, link cut, human-error, natural disaster, physical- and cyber-attacks. A node failure in one network may lead to a malfunction of dependent nodes in other networks. This may occur recursively, triggering an avalanche of cascading and escalating damage to the system of multiple coupled networks, and also cause widespread social disruption. The recent disasters ranging from Italy electrical blackout in 2003 to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the on-going quakes in Christchurch, have shown that the most hazardous vulnerabilities are hiding in the interdependences across networks. Therefore, the main objective of our cascade effects research is to understand how these uncontrollable cascading phenomena happen, what are the governing laws behind them, and also the root causes of fragilities raised by interdependencies. We are targeting to analytically model these cascade effects and also develop new solutions to tackle these challenging robustness problems in national interdependent cyberinfrastures.

In my presentation, I will start with an introduction on cyberinfrastructure and complex networks and then the explanation of interdependencies in these coupled networks, as well as the cascading failures phenomena. Second of all, I will present the motivations for this research, key questions to be discovered, review the existing solutions and also our primary investigation on it. At the end, I will demonstrate an example of cascading failure effects using the simulator.