Cascading failure model for improving the robustness from the perspective of traffic planning

In the field of complex networks, construction cost and operational stability are the main topics for traffic networks. Increasing the investment in key edges and reducing the investment in nonkey edges can effectively reduce the cost and improve the network stability. Much empirical evidence shows that an edge with a high load is not always the priority. A new method of unifying the weights is presented. This method can compare the importance of edges in different cascading failure models. By studying a large number of research experiments, a new model for controlling the cascading failure and construction cost is proposed. The performance of three models for the scale-free network and the traffic network has been explored. The reason why the new model shows a more stable performance than the other models has been explained through the computational methods. In conclusion, the new model can control the spreading of a cascading failure in the traffic network well. This paper might be useful for preventing and mitigating cascading failures in other traffic networks.