Optimal local interventions in the two-dimensional Abelian sandpile model

Abstract

The Abelian sandpile model serves as a canonical example of self-organized criticality. This critical behavior manifests itself through large cascading events triggered by small perturbations. Such large-scale events, known as avalanches, are often regarded as stylized representations of catastrophic phenomena, such as earthquakes or forest fires. Motivated by this perspective, we study strategies to reduce avalanche sizes. We provide a first rigorous analysis of the impact of interventions in the Abelian sandpile model, considering a setting in which an external controller can perturb a configuration by removing sand grains at selected locations. We first develop and formalize an extended method to compute the expected size of an avalanche originating from a connected component of critical vertices, i.e., vertices at maximum height. Using this method, we characterize the structure of avalanches starting from square components and explicitly analyze the effect of interventions in such components. Our results show that the optimal intervention locations strike an interesting balance between reduction of largest avalanche sizes and increasing the number of mitigated avalanches.