Robustness Analysis of Interdependent Networks under Grey Information Attack

Abstract In modern society, many infrastructures are interdependent owing to functional and logical relations among components in different systems, and they can be characterized as complex interdependent networks. Interdependency makes network so fragile that even a slight initial disturbance may lead to a cascading failure of the entire systems. Previous research on interdependent networks has focused on two types of initial attack: random attack and degree-based targeted attack. In this paper, a grey information attack strategy with the information incompleteness and complexity by adjusting the tunable parameters was designed, and a cascading failure process is studied considering their effects on failure propagation. Moreover, the robustness of two types of interdependent networks (BA - BA, ER - ER) is evaluated under grey attacking strategies. Interesting conclusions could be obtained. The simulation results show that the proposed method can identify the key nodes more effectively, and the robustness of the network decreases with the increase of the grey attack coefficient. In addition, the relation between weight coefficient and robustness under various strategy is quite different. Our results can be very useful for safety design and protection of interdependent networks.