Mitigation and Recovery From Cascading Failures in Interdependent Networks Under Uncertainty

The interdependence of multiple networks makes today's infrastructures more vulnerable to failures. Prior works mainly focused on robust network design and recovery strategies after failures, given complete knowledge of failure location. Nevertheless, in real-world scenarios, the location of failures might be unknown or only partially known. In this paper, we focus on cascading failures involving the power grid and its communication network with imprecision in failure assessment. We consider a model where functionality of the power grid and its failure assessment rely on the operation of a monitoring system and vice versa. We address ongoing cascading failures with a twofold approach: first, once a cascading failure is detected, we limit further propagation by redispatching generation and shedding loads; and second, we formulate a recovery plan to maximize the total amount of load served during the recovery intervention. We performed extensive simulations on real network topologies showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of number of disrupted power lines and total served load.