Cascading failures in complex networks caused by overload attacks

Complex networks are known to be vulnerable to the failure of components in terms of structural robustness. An as yet less researched topic is dynamical robustness, which refers to the ability of a network to maintain its dynamical activity against local disturbances. This paper introduces a new type of attack—the overload attack—to disturb the network’s dynamical activity. The attack is based on the load redistribution model for sequential attacks. The main contribution are heuristics to assess the vulnerability of complex networks with respect to this type of attack. The effectiveness of the heuristics is demonstrated with an application for real power networks.