Protection of Critical Infrastructures: A Methodology for Facilitating Modeling and Simulation of Notional Scenarios

Abstract

The fear of terrorist attacks whether it be at a small or large scale keeps increasing and people struggle to find a way to protect civil vital assets, population areas, land and coastal sites, as well as strategic sites and critical infrastructures. The use of sophisticated methods, and advanced technologies by individuals engaged in criminal activities, pose an extreme challenge to the detection of potential malevolent systems, especially in the case of aerial systems flying at low or very low altitude. Therefore, enhancing the capabilities of detection of aerial systems that could be a threat to the nations’ critical infrastructures and key assets is a necessity. This involves identifying the best positioning of detection systems enabling the protection of a particular asset in a timely fashion. However, this is hindered by the complex nature of the system of systems required to provide an efficient protection. Moreover, it is difficult to fully protect a densely populated area where the detection of suspicious and potentially harmful activities is highly compromised. Therefore, current systems used for the protection of critical infrastructures and key assets are generally not adapted to and not optimized for the problem at hand. Besides, the assets requiring efficient protection against potential malevolent systems are highly heterogeneous in nature, as are the potential threats to these assets. The complexity and challenges associated to this problem may explain why a methodology enabling the definition of detection systems of systems able to provide accurate scanning of the low altitude air domain, in a specific geographic and climatic environment, is currently lacking. Finally, the combinatorial aspect of the problem usually hinders the conduct of a thorough study of all available possibilities of protection. That may be one reason why, to date, a structured methodology for the design of network-enabled systems does not exist. This paper thus proposes a methodology aimed at addressing the aforementioned gaps and challenges. This methodology particularly reformulates the problem in clear terms so as to facilitate the subsequent modeling and simulation of potential threat scenarios. This paper describes the steps involved in the implementation of the proposed approach, as well as the modeling and simulation of a notional scenario, using an agent-based modeling and simulation tool. The results of the simulation help gain insight into the reality of the problem.