Cascade events in geographical space

Abstract

In this paper, we present a simple discrete model of cascade behavior in an actual geographical space with built environments. By simultaneously triggering and relaxing random locations in a network of Voronoi cells interacting via the gravity model, we observe nontrivial statistics with heavy-tailed distributions of cells and actual area extents involved in the cascade. The distributions of these affected areas follow unimodal statistics, unlike the other externally-driven models operating over uniform neighborhoods that exhibit power-laws. Majority of the cascades are limited within the immediate neighborhoods of adjacent Voronoi cells, even for sufficiently large triggering magnitudes. The results are viewed from the perspective of inhomogeneous driving in sandpile-based models, and benchmarked with distributions obtained in other geographic datasets. The method offers a complexity perspective into the generation of large-scale events in physical and intangible flows, and explains their origins from cascaded accumulations of slow, random, and intermittent processes.