Satisfiability-Based Analysis of Cascading Failures in Systems of Interdependent Networks

This paper proposes a Boolean satisfiability (SAT)-based approach to the analysis of cascading failures in systems of interdependent networks. Typical examples of such systems are power systems, where a power transmission network and a SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) network are dependent on each other. The proposed approach reduces the problem of analyzing cascading failures to the SAT problem by constructing Boolean formulas that symbolically represent all possible failure scenarios under given conditions. This allows us to examine a numerous number of scenarios by means of fast modern SAT solvers. The results of experiments show that the proposed approach can deal with practical size systems, such as the IEEE 39 bus system, which ordinary approaches fail to handle.