Abstract: The robustness of infrastructure networks has attracted great attention in recent years. Scholars have studied the robustness of complex networks against cascading failures from different aspects. In this paper, a new capacity allocation strategy is proposed to reduce cascading failures and improve network robustness without changing the network structure. Compared with the typical strategy proposed in Motter-Lai (ML) model, the new strategy can reduce the scale of cascading failure. The new strategy applied in scale-free network is more efficient. In addition, to reasonably evaluate the two strategies, we introduce contribution rate of unit capacity to network robustness as evaluation index. Results show that our new strategy works well, and it is more advantageous in the rational utilization of capacity in scale-free networks. Furthermore, we were surprised to find that the efficient utilization of capacity costs declined as costs rose above a certain threshold, which indicates that it is not wise to restrain cascading failures by increasing capacity costs indefinitely.

Key words: capacity, cascading failure, complex network, robustness