Network Design Method Resistant to Cascade Failure Considering Betweenness Centrality

Abstract

There are many cases in which a single failure in a network, such as congestion, large-scale power failure, and traffic congestion in an information network, causes a chain of failures and load increases by concentrating the load on a part of nodes or links, and the damage expands. In order to avoid cascade failures, it is necessary to prevent the load from concentrating on some nodes and links. Cascade failures are likely to occur from nodes or links with high betweenness centrality. Even if the original network was designed so that there were no nodes or links with high betweenness centrality, the betweenness centrality would change due to a failure. On the other hand, if links and nodes are properly protected, nodes and links with high betweenness centrality can be prevented from appearing even after a failure; consequently, further cascade failures can be prevented. In this paper, we formulate the optimization problem to determine such nodes and links and prove the NP-hardness. In addition, we propose a polynomial-time approximation algorithm and evaluate the performance.