Abstract
Society is reliant on infrastructure services, such as information and communication technology, energy, water, and food supply, but also on governmental, cultural, and search and rescue organizations. The goal of project Kritis-KAT at the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance in Germany is the development of generic criteria for the identification and evaluation of infrastructures regarded as “critical” for society. Acknowledging that full protection against all threats and cascading effects is not possible, the approach focuses on the impacts rather than the prevention of threats. The development of generic criteria requires the prioritization of infrastructures and identification of their key characteristics for civil protection purposes, risk management activities, and strategic proactive planning. For this purpose, the development of a national critical infrastructure priority inventory is based on a thorough examination of the range of criteria typically used in similar approaches. The specific focus of this paper is to identify and simplify essential characteristics of infrastructure criticality. The main outcome of this study is the development of common criteria generally applicable to a variety of infrastructures.
Highlights
Infrastructures are primarily conceived as technical structures, built by humans to facilitate the distribution of goods and services
Criticality, describes the relevance of a given asset, which can be described by capabilities such as load, or indirectly by the number of customers supplied with a product or service
The following table shows a conceptual list of infrastructure components, deduced by a cross-sectoral analysis of the official critical infrastructure (KRITIS) sectors used by Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance
Summary
Infrastructures are primarily conceived as technical structures, built by humans to facilitate the distribution of goods and services. Such infrastructures have existed and society has made itself dependent on such support. Progress and civilization are major drivers behind an ever increasing self-induced dependency on the mass-distribution of information, goods, and services. Influencing factors for an increasing dependency on infrastructure services are ongoing urbanization, economic globalization, and developments in information technology, for instance. These developments bring prosperity, and expose society to new risks. The criticality of infrastructure services becomes most evident and visible in case of a failure, when services and resources are suddenly not available anymore
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