2016/12/07 by Ho Fai Po, Chi Ho Yeung, An Zeng +1
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Abelian sandpile model #Analogy #Criticality #Engineering #Epistemology #Geological formations and processes #Landslides and related hazards #Philosophy #Physics #Power (physics) #Self-organized criticality #Statistical physics #cond-mat.stat-mech #earthquake and tectonic studies #nlin.AO #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.96.052312
published as Phys. Rev. E 96, 052312 (2017)
arxiv created 2016/12/07 · openalex publication_date 2017/11/17 · arxiv updated 2018/10/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The stability of powergrid is crucial since its disruption affects systems ranging from street lightings to hospital life-support systems. While short-term dynamics of single-event cascading failures have been extensively studied, less is understood on the long-term evolution and self-organization of powergrids. In this paper, we introduce a simple model of evolving powergrid and establish its connection with the sandpile model and earthquakes, i.e., self-organized systems with intermittent strain releases. Various aspects during its self-organization are examined, including blackout magnitudes, their interevent waiting time, the predictability of large blackouts, as well as the spatiotemporal rescaling of blackout data. We examined the self-organized strain releases on simulated networks as well as the IEEE 118-bus system, and we show that both simulated and empirical blackout waiting times can be rescaled in space and time similarly to those observed between earthquakes. Finally, we suggested proactive maintenance strategies to drive the powergrids away from self-organization to suppress large blackouts.