Related Experiment Videos
Human initiated cascading failures in societal infrastructures
Chris Barrett1, Karthik Channakeshava, Fei Huang
1Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, United States of America.
Plos One
|November 3, 2012
Summary
Human behavior during crises can trigger cascading infrastructure failures. Evacuation responses overload transport and cellular networks, leading to unexpected system collapses, even with high compliance rates.
Area of Science:
- Socio-technical systems analysis
- Network science
- Crisis response modeling
Background:
- Societal infrastructures like cellular, transportation, and mobile call networks are highly interdependent.
- Behavioral adaptations during crises significantly impact network loads and system performance.
- Existing system dynamics models struggle to represent the intricate co-evolution of these coupled infrastructures.
Purpose of the Study:
- To systematically study human-initiated cascading failures in interdependent infrastructures.
- To model the impact of behavioral adaptations on cellular, transportation, and mobile call networks during a crisis.
- To analyze the co-evolution and interaction challenges within these socio-technical systems.
Main Methods:
- Development of interaction-based models representing individuals and infrastructure in a common geographic system.
- Simulation of a chemical plume crisis and subsequent evacuation scenarios in an urban region.
- Sensitivity analysis of evacuation compliance rates on infrastructure loading and failure.
Main Results:
- Evacuation behaviors, including altered travel and calling patterns, cause flash-congestion in transport and wireless networks.
- Infrastructure failures, particularly base station overload, can result from prolonged road congestion.
- Non-intuitive findings show that lower evacuation compliance (70%) can overload more base stations than higher compliance (90%).
Conclusions:
- Human behavioral adaptations are critical drivers of cascading failures in interdependent infrastructures.
- Interaction-based modeling provides a detailed approach to understanding complex socio-technical system dynamics during crises.
- Crisis management strategies must account for non-linear effects of public response on infrastructure resilience.
Related Concept Videos
01:41Social Traps
Social traps are negative situations where people get caught in a direction or relationship that later proves to be unpleasant, with no easy way to back out of or avoid. The concept was orignally introduced by John Platt who applied psychology to Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons", where in New England herd owners could let their cattle graze in the common ground. This situation seems like a good idea, but an individual could have an advantage. If they owned more cows, the larger...
02:31Habitat Fragmentation
Habitat fragmentation describes the division of a more extensive, continuous habitat into smaller, discontinuous areas. Human activities such as land conversion, as well as slower geological processes leading to changes in the physical environment, are the two leading causes of habitat fragmentation. The fragmentation process typically follows the same steps: perforation, dissection, fragmentation, shrinkage, and attrition.
01:50Threats to Biodiversity
There have been five major extinction events throughout geological history, resulting in the elimination of biodiversity, followed by a rebound of species that adapted to the new conditions. In the current geological epoch, the Holocene, there is a sixth extinction event in progress. This mass extinction has been attributed to human activities and is thus provisionally called the Anthropocene. In 2019 the human population reached 7.7 billion people and is projected to comprise 10 billion by...
01:42Schemas
A schema is a mental construct consisting of a cluster or collection of related concepts (Bartlett, 1932). There are many different types of schemata, and they all have one thing in common: schemata are a method of organizing information that allows the brain to work more efficiently. When a schema is activated, the brain makes immediate assumptions about the person or object being observed.
01:29Applications of GIS: Disaster Management and Emergency Response
Geographic Information System (GIS) technology is essential for risk identification, action prioritization, and resource optimization in critical situations like flooding and earthquakes. By integrating spatial and demographic data, GIS provides a comprehensive framework for emergency response.GIS integrates data layers, like rainfall intensity, topography, elevation profiles, and river levels, to model high-risk flood zones. These layers assess areas susceptible to flooding based on their...
01:14Fundamental Attribution Error
According to some social psychologists, people tend to overemphasize internal factors as explanations—or attributions—for the behavior of other people. They tend to assume that the behavior of another person is a trait of that person, and to underestimate the power of the situation on the behavior of others. They tend to fail to recognize when the behavior of another is due to situational variables, and thus to the person’s state. This erroneous assumption is called the fundamental attribution...