ML Surrogate Ranks Criticality in Power-Communication Networks

Sohini Roy, Xheni Hylviu· July 13, 2026 View original

Key takeaways

  • Machine learning can significantly accelerate the assessment of critical component vulnerabilities in interdependent networks.
  • A Gradient Boosting surrogate model achieved high accuracy in predicting contingency severity and ranking component criticality.
  • The model's advantage stems from its ability to process inter-layer dependency information effectively.
  • This approach enables a more efficient two-stage workflow for resilience planning, combining rapid ML assessment with targeted high-fidelity simulation.

Who benefits

EnergyUtilitiesTelecommunicationsCritical InfrastructureGovernment

Summary

This paper develops a machine learning model to rapidly predict contingency severity and rank component criticality in interdependent power-communication networks, overcoming the computational cost of high-fidelity simulations. The Gradient Boosting surrogate achieves high correlation with ground-truth simulations, enabling efficient resilience planning.

Cyber-physical power systems face significant risks from cascading failures due to their tight integration with communication infrastructure. Traditional methods for evaluating these failures, especially across a large number of potential N-k contingencies, are computationally intensive and impractical for real-time resilience planning. Researchers have introduced a machine learning surrogate model designed to accelerate this process. Utilizing a Gradient Boosting algorithm, the model predicts the severity of contingencies and ranks the criticality of individual components within these complex networks. This approach allows for a much faster assessment, making it feasible to identify and prioritize components for hardening against potential failures. The surrogate model demonstrated strong performance on the IEEE 118-bus system, achieving high Spearman correlations for both contingency severity prediction and component criticality ranking. Its effectiveness is attributed to its ability to leverage inter-layer dependency information, significantly outperforming simpler topological centrality measures. This suggests a two-stage workflow where the ML model quickly identifies high-risk areas, with more detailed simulations reserved for verification.

Why it matters

Professionals in critical infrastructure management can use this ML surrogate to significantly speed up resilience planning and identify vulnerabilities in complex power and communication systems. This allows for more proactive and cost-effective hardening strategies against cascading failures.

How to implement this in your domain

  1. 1Integrate the ML surrogate model into existing infrastructure planning software to automate initial vulnerability assessments.
  2. 2Prioritize hardening efforts on components identified as highly critical by the surrogate to maximize resilience impact.
  3. 3Develop a two-stage workflow where the ML model provides rapid initial rankings, followed by high-fidelity simulations for selected critical scenarios.
  4. 4Collect and preprocess relevant structural and interdependency data from your power and communication networks to train and validate similar surrogate models.

Original post by Sohini Roy, Xheni Hylviu

"arXiv:2607.08918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cyber-physical power systems are vulnerable to cascading failures caused by tight interdependencies between power and communication infrastructures. Evaluating these failures over large N-k contingency sets with a high-fidelity simu…"

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Originally posted by Sohini Roy, Xheni Hylviu on X · view source

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