Roles of betweenness in controlling catastrophic cascading failures on scale-free networks

Humans are suffering from the serious consequences of catastrophic accidents of complex systems that are initially triggered by only a small fraction of nodes´ failures. We employ Olami-Feder-Christensen (OFC) model as a prototype of the avalanche dynamics to study cascading catastrophes on scale-free networks, and we propose a novel energy relaxation rule based on node betweenness, which suppresses the propagation failures from toppled nodes to the rest of the network and thus reduces the catastrophes´ degree effectively.