Robust Distributed Routing in Dynamical Networks - Part II: Strong Resilience, Equilibrium Selection and Cascaded Failures

Abstract

Strong resilience properties of dynamical networks are analyzed for distributed routing policies. The latter are characterized by the property that the way the outflow at a non-destination node gets split among its outgoing links is allowed to depend only on local information about the current particle densities on the outgoing links. The strong resilience of the network is defined as the infimum sum of link-wise flow capacity reductions making the asymptotic total inflow to the destination node strictly less than the total outflow at the origin. A class of distributed routing policies that are responsive to local information is shown to yield the maximum possible strong resilience under such local information constraints for an acyclic dynamical network with a single origin-destination pair. The maximal achievable strong resilience is shown to be equal to the minimum node residual capacity of the network. The latter depends on the limit flow of the unperturbed network and is defined as the minimum, among all the non-destination nodes, of the sum, over all the links outgoing from the node, of the differences between the maximum flow capacity and the limit flow of the unperturbed network. We propose a simple convex optimization problem to solve for equilibrium flows of the unperturbed network that minimize average delay subject to strong resilience guarantees, and discuss the use of tolls to induce such an equilibrium flow in traffic networks. Finally, we present illustrative simulations to discuss the connection between cascaded failures and the resilience properties of the network.