Cascading Failures Mitigation Strategy for Resilient Water Infrastructures

Critical infrastructures are required to provide high quality of services and operation in present modern societies. Recent incidents of cyber-physical attacks and failures in water distribution systems (WDSs) have necessitated finding new solutions to mitigate large-scale cascading failures. In this paper, we propose a graph partitioning method based on the most vulnerable typed-graphlets to contain the damage impact in the most vulnerable target partition by preventing the failures from propagating outside the said partition. Towards this objective, we first formulate the optimal partitioning problem with the objective of minimizing the water leakages subject to hydraulic constraints, and then we solve it using a low-complexity algorithm. We conduct simulations on a 396-node WDS. Our investigations reveal a 54% average decrease in the overall damage compared to the case without any partitioning. Copyright (c) 2023 The Authors.