Abstract

This article focuses on the issue of assessing the cascading effects of critical energy and transport infrastructure elements at the fundamental level. The introductory part deals with the typology of failures and their impacts, which spread through the critical infrastructure system. At this stage, the paper presents current approaches to assessing the cascading effects and, in particular, addresses a newly developed assessment methodology. The following part defines the initial conditions of assessment and describes selected elements from the areas of energy and rail transport to which the methodology will be subsequently applied. The main part of the article is a case study of the proposed methodology, assessing the cascading effects by calculating the value of their risks, depending on the resilience and correlation of the rated elements.

Highlights

  • Infrastructure failures brought about by system malfunction or disruption due to a terrorist attack or natural or technical causes are likely to increase significantly the extent of impacts on the failure of other dependent infrastructure

  • In order to effectively evaluate cascading impacts in a critical infrastructure system, the scenarios of emergency impacts on the elements being evaluated must be viewed within the context of specific threats, which can be classified in five basic groups [18]: - climatological; - geological; - biological; - technological; - social

  • The continuous progress in scientific and technical knowledge inevitably leads to ever-increasing demands placed on critical infrastructure

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Summary

Introduction

Infrastructure failures brought about by system malfunction or disruption due to a terrorist attack or natural or technical causes are likely to increase significantly the extent of impacts on the failure of other dependent infrastructure. This is due to interdependencies existing between infrastructure segments which can exert a direct influence on these effects. Interdependency, as opposed to dependency, implies a mutual relationship between two or more infrastructures. Those dependencies may be classified into several types. Infrastructure dependencies determine individual types of failures or effects [2]. A common-cause failure occurs when two or more infrastructure networks are disrupted at the same time

Approaches to assessing cascading effects
Initial conditions of the case study
Evaluating resilience of selected elements
Preparedness
Absorption
Responsiveness
Recoverability
Adaptability
Evaluating correlation of selected elements
Evaluating the risk of impact propagation between selected elements
Conclusion
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