Cascade failure occurs when the failure of one component leads to the failure of related areas of the system, causing overall system failure. Complexity science aims to identify the root causes of such failures to prevent them. Examples include power grid outages and airplane crashes. Kessler syndrome predicts the exponential increase of debris in low Earth orbit, making space travel riskier.
A cascade failure is a condition of interconnected systems when the failure of one part or component can lead to a failure in related areas of the system that propagates to the point of overall system failure. There are many types of cascading fault events that can occur in natural and man-made systems, from electrical and computer systems to political, economic and ecological systems. The research field known as complexity science attempts to define the root causes of such failures so as to build safeguards that may be able to prevent them in the future.
A common but difficult to predict type of cascading failure event is a single point of failure, where a component fails and inexplicably leads to a domino effect, triggering a rapid spread of the condition to other parts of the system. An example of this occurred in 1996 in the United States, when a power line in the state of Oregon failed and triggered a massive power grid outage throughout the western states of the United States and Canada, affecting between 4,000,000 and 10,000,000 customers. When the transmission line failed, it caused the regional power grid to break into separate transmission islands that were unable to handle the increased load, and then also fail, leading to the collapse of the entire system. A similar cascade failure occurred in the west-central US state of Ohio in 2003, leading to the largest power blackout in US history.
Often, a cascade failure involves multiple systems failing due to the butterfly effect, where an apparently very small event propagates to produce a much larger one. An example of this is the crash of a DC-10 aircraft over Paris, France in 1974, killing all on board. A subsequent investigation into the cause of the accident revealed that a cargo hold door had not been closed properly. The man most directly responsible for this allegedly couldn’t read English and was therefore unable to read the instructions on how to properly lock the door.
The technical design for the cargo door allowed it to be closed without the latches fully engaged. As the aircraft climbed to 13,000 feet (3,962 meters), internal pressure caused the hatch to fail and explosive decompression around the hatch blasting damaged hydraulic controls in the area, eventually causing complete loss of control of the aircraft. airplane. The root cause of such a cascade failure is difficult to determine. It includes education regions, government policies for hiring immigrants, engineering projects for hydraulics and avionics, and informal social support systems within the workplace.
Electrical grids of high voltage systems are the most notable example of large cascade failure events, but failures in large systems are not uncommon. From traffic jams to market crashes or forest fires starting with a single spark, large system crashes are often the direct result of what is known as a Byzantine fault event, where one element of a system fails in a massive way. unusual, often continuing to run and corrupt its environment before it shuts down completely. Such events reveal a condition underlying all complex systems described by chaos theory, which is that of sensible dependence. Each part of a system is expected to behave within a certain range of parameters, and when it deviates from that range, it can start a chain reaction that alters the behavior of the entire system.
Kessler syndrome is one example among many where science is trying to get ahead of the curve and predict cascading failure before it occurs. Based on the theories of Donald Kessler in 1978, a US scientist working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), traces the effects of colliding objects in low Earth orbit (LEO). Such collisions over time will fuel an exponential increase in the number of small particles in LEO, known as the debris belt, making space travel far riskier than before. Over 500,000 pieces of orbiting debris traveling at up to 17,500 miles per hour (28,164 kilometers per hour) are being monitored as of 2011 on a continuous basis to avoid future catastrophic collisions. A particle as small as a marble could cause irreparable damage to a military or scientific spacecraft upon impact, resulting in possible deaths or political and ecological impacts of unforeseen proportions.
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