Advanced Methods for the Risk, Vulnerability and Resilience Assessment of Safety-Critical Engineering Components, Systems and Infrastructures, in the presence of uncertainties

cascading models in network optimization tasks. As a further step in the comparison between topological and flow-based models, in [Fang et al., 2015b] we have tackled the problem of searching for the most favorable pattern of link capacity allocation for a CI power network with the objective of resisting to cascading failures with limited investment costs. As before, low vulnerability and low cost are conflicting objectives: for instance, a network whose components have high capacity can be highly resistant to failures; however, this type of components is often characterized by high costs. The problem has been formulated within a multi-objective optimization framework and has been solved by an evolutionary algorithm, namely