Modeling and solving cascading failures across interdependent infrastructure systems

Physical infrastructure systems supply crucial resources to residential, commercial, and industrial activities. These infrastructure systems generally consist of multiple types of infrastructure assets that are interdependent. In the event of a disaster, some of the infrastructure assets can be damaged and disabled, creating failures that propagate to other assets that depend on the disabled assets and cause a cascade of failures that may lead to a potential system collapse. We present a bilevel interdiction model in this paper to study this problem of cascading failures in a system of interdependent infrastructure systems with a nondeterministic dependency graph. We also propose a computationally tractable reformulation of the proposed bilevel model and utilize a Benders-type decomposition algorithm to solve the resulting formulation. Computational experiments are performed using infrastructure networks generated from anonymized real-world data to validate the performance of this algorithm.