Tolerance Analysis of Cyber-Manufacturing Systems to Cascading Failures

Abstract

In practical cyber-manufacturing systems (CMS), the node component is the forwarder of information and the provider of services. This dual role makes the whole system have the typical physical-services interaction characteristic, making CMS more vulnerable to cascading failures than general manufacturing systems. In this work, in order to reasonably characterize the cascading process of CMS, we first develop an interdependent network model for CMS from a physical-service networking perspective. On this basis, a realistic cascading failure model for CMS is designed with full consideration of the routing-oriented load distribution characteristics of the physical network and selective load distribution characteristics of the service network. Through extensive experiments, the soundness of the proposed model has been verified and some meaningful findings have been obtained: (1) attacks on the physical network are more likely to trigger cascading failures and may cause more damage; (2) interdependency failures are the main cause of performance degradation in the service network during cascading failures; and (3) isolation failures are the main cause of performance degradation in the physical network during cascading failures. The obtained results can certainly help users to design a more reliable CMS against cascading failures.