A Simulation Tool for Cascading Effects in Interdependent Critical Infrastructures

Abstract

Critical infrastructures are a core part in modern society, supplying essential goods and services for our everyday life. Therefore, any incident compromising the operation of a critical infrastructure can directly affect the social life. Moreover, due to the increasing interconnections between critical infrastructures, any incident can have cascading effects on other infrastructures as well. In this article, we present a novel simulation framework which allows to model the interdependencies and thus also the cascading effects among critical infrastructures. This framework builds upon stochastic processes describing, on the one hand, the relations between the critical infrastructures and, on the other hand, the random and sometimes arbitrary propagation of the consequences. This existing framework is extended and implemented in OMNeT++, which allows an easy and swift implementation of the mathematical algorithms and also provides a built-in visualization of the propagation of consequences within the critical infrastructure network. The goal is to support risk and security officers within the critical infrastructure in their decisions.