Brittleness analysis of complex systems subject to cascading failure

This paper suggests a non-cooperative game model based on brittleness entropy for predicting the brittle subsystem of a complex system subject to cascading failure. Cascading failure is referred to as a failure that not only causes outage to the subsystem from which the failure originates, but also affects all other correlated subsystems causing the entire complex system failure. Subsystems of a complex system are mapped to the players of the game. Each of players has two optional strategies: rational for negative entropy and irrational for negative entropy. In this paper, the model is designed to identify the players selected irrational for negative entropy, which are brittle subsystems. To assess the validity of the proposed method, seven indices which are used to compare with the proposed model have been analyzed. An example of fire alarm system is analyzed to demonstrate advantages of the proposed model.