Research Article
Percolation Theories for Multipartite Networked Systems under
Random Failures
Qing Cai ,
1
Sameer Alam ,
1
Mahardhika Pratama ,
2
and Zhen Wang
3
1
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
2
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
3
School of Mechanical Engineering and Center for Optical Imagery Analysis and Learning (OPTIMAL),
Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China
Correspondence should be addressed to Sameer Alam; sameeralam@ntu.edu.sg, Mahardhika Pratama; pratama@ieee.org, and
Zhen Wang; w-zhen@nwpu.edu.cn
Received 26 November 2019; Accepted 26 March 2020; Published 20 May 2020
Academic Editor: Chittaranjan Hens
Copyright © 2020 Qing Cai et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Real-world complex systems inevitably suffer from perturbations. When some system components break down and trigger
cascading failures on a system, the system will be out of control. In order to assess the tolerance of complex systems to per-
turbations, an effective way is to model a system as a network composed of nodes and edges and then carry out network robustness
analysis. Percolation theories have proven as one of the most effective ways for assessing the robustness of complex systems.
However, existing percolation theories are mainly for multilayer or interdependent networked systems, while little attention is
paid to complex systems that are modeled as multipartite networks. is paper fills this void by establishing the percolation
theories for multipartite networked systems under random failures. To achieve this goal, this paper first establishes two network
models to describe how cascading failures propagate on multipartite networks subject to random node failures. Afterward, this
paper adopts the largest connected component concept to quantify the networks’ robustness. Finally, this paper develops the
corresponding percolation theories based on the developed network models. Simulations on computer-generated multipartite
networks demonstrate that the proposed percolation theories coincide quite well with the simulations.
1.Introduction
It is universally acknowledged that complex systems are
ubiquitous in our lives [1]. Complex systems like city
transportation systems [2] and power supplier systems [3]
are indispensable infrastructures to human life. In order to
better understand complex systems so as to facilitate better
service providing, an effective way is to model a complex
system as a complex network composed of nodes and edges
with the nodes denoting the system components and the
edges representing the interactions between system com-
ponents [4]. For example, a power grid system can be
represented by a network in which a node denotes a power
station and an edge denotes the transmission line between
two stations. Complex network modeling and analysis have
proven as a potent instrument for system control [5–7] and
have received great popularity in the last two decades [8, 9].
Note that complex systems in reality will inevitably suffer
from external and/or internal unpredictable perturbations
which can trigger cascading failures wreaking havoc on
system structures and functionalities [5, 10]. A dramatic
event in history was the Italian blackout that happened in
2003 [11]. It had been reported that the blackout was
triggered by the breakdown of several power lines caused by
a storm. It was until the seminal work done in [11] that the
science underlying the event had been disclosed from the
perspective of network robustness analysis. Network ro-
bustness analysis now has proven to be an effective approach
to evaluating the robustness of complex systems so as to help
prevent unseen system disasters [12–14]. Due to its
Hindawi
Complexity
Volume 2020, Article ID 3974503, 12 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/3974503