Interdependent Critical Infrastructures Research Articles

Building the Right Tool for the Job: Value of Stakeholder Involvement When Developing Decision-Support Technologies for Emergency Management

AbstractComputer-aided simulation and decision-support tools have a recognized role in planning for, and responding to, extreme hazard events. Multi-network interdependent critical infrastructure program for the analysis of lifelines (MUNICIPAL) is a multipurpose computer-simulation and decision-support tool that was developed to simulate the damage to interdependent critical infrastructure systems during extreme weather events and to guide their restoration following such events. This paper describes the interactive stakeholder-involvement process that was used during the development of MUNICIPAL to increase the likelihood that it would become a useful aid to planners and policymakers, emergency managers, and infrastructure service providers. It demonstrates that a structured process for obtaining input from the user community throughout the process can increase the likelihood that tools such as MUNICIPAL will be adopted for training, awareness raising, and team building among the diverse public and priv...

Modeling Critical Infrastructure Interdependency: The Case of the Mexico City Metro Transport System

ABSTRACT“Critical infrastructures” are exceedingly complex and highly interconnected. In order to gain a full understanding and comprehensive awareness of the risks associated with critical infrastructures it becomes essential to consider in a coherent way all the aspects that may cause a failure of such systems. That is, there is a need for a systemic approach to interdependencies among critical infrastructures. The article presents the application of a systemic safety management system (SSMS) model to interdependency modeling for the case of the Mexico City Metro transport network. The model has highlighted that interdependencies occur vertically and horizontally. Horizontal interdependency occurs at every level of recursion and can be: operational, managerial, and environmental. Vertical interdependency, on the other hand, occurs between two levels of recursion only. The SSMS model has shown the potential to be used to model interdependencies among critical infrastructures. It is hoped that the approach presented may help to gain a better understanding of critical infrastructure interdependency.

A fault diagnosis system for interdependent critical infrastructures based on HMMs

Modern society depends on the smooth functioning of critical infrastructures which provide services of fundamental importance, e.g. telecommunications and water supply. These infrastructures may suffer from faults/malfunctions coming e.g. from aging effects or they may even comprise targets of terrorist attacks. Prompt detection and accommodation of these situations is of paramount significance.This paper proposes a probabilistic modeling scheme for analyzing malicious events appearing in interdependent critical infrastructures. The proposed scheme is based on modeling the relationship between datastreams coming from two network nodes by means of a hidden Markov model (HMM) trained on the parameters of linear time-invariant dynamic systems which estimate the relationships existing among the specific nodes over consecutive time windows. Our study includes an energy network (IEEE 30 model bus) operated via a telecommunications infrastructure.The relationships among the elements of the network of infrastructures are represented by an HMM and the novel data is categorized according to its distance (computed in the probabilistic space) from the training ones. We considered two types of cyber-attacks (denial of service and integrity/replay) and report encouraging results in terms of false positive rate, false negative rate and detection delay.

Interdependent critical infrastructures resilience: methodology and case study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a coherence analysis to evaluate the resilience for a critical infrastructure (CI). This is the new way to evaluate the CI and demonstrate that the authors need to pass from the protection towards resilience. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use two approaches for this research. First is a consequence-based approach to evaluate the resilience. This approach has been used many times for evaluating the interdependencies between CIs. The second is a systemic approach to characterize the system and doing the coherence analysis. Findings – This paper presents a methodology to evaluate the coherence in a context of CIs protection. The coherence analysis in resilience is a new concept and the first result to the application seems very good for the user of the research. Originality/value – The originality of this paper is the coherence analysis applied to a resilience evaluation. The criteria for coherence analysis is innovative and it is a new way to consider the resilience and the relation between an organization and it is partners. Another value is the need for a wider scope in the analysis of hazards and how to address them that includes the infrastructure system itself, but also other related organizations and infrastructure systems.

Milk or Wine: Are Critical Infrastructure Protection Architectures Improving with Age?

This paper contextualizes the nature of threats to critical infrastructure, especially vulnerabilities within electric grid systems, and analyzes key considerations for the protection architecture of such systems. By exploring historical case studies, we demonstrate the potential for blind spots in infrastructure protection policy, which can leave electric grids vulnerable to a variety of threats, including improvisational malignant devices. These devices in turn have the potential to catalyze cascading failure scenarios within interdependent critical infrastructure systems, constituting “wicked problems” of complexity that bear relevance to a variety of public and private institutions responsible for the provision of essential services.

RESAERCH DESIGN FOR RESILIENCE OF URBAN INTERDEPENDENT CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES AND SUPPLY CHAIN PROCESSES

ABSTRACT This article studies the resilience capabilities of urban supply chain processes and interdependent critical infrastructures (CIs). By proposing the use of high performance computing capabilities and real-time and historical big data processing, this research seeks to design simulation models and create an encompassing scenario library to provide response and recovery forecast of the interdependent CIs during disruption events of different scales and natures. We illustrate the oil and gas supply chain processes in the Greater Houston Metropolitan Area that control the petroleum and petrochemical supply chain distributions in the United States. The CI systems examined in this research included oil and gas refinery facilities, inbound and outbound distribution pipelines, power plant and electric generating systems, telecommunication systems, and social network of stakeholders. Directions of future research are also discussed. Keywords Supply Chain Management, Critical Infrastructure, Infrastructure Interdependency, Supply Chain Resilience

국가기반시설의 상호의존도매트릭스 및 방재력을 고려한 광역정전에 대한 재난영향 분석

국가기반시설은 그 중요성으로 인해 개별단위 시설관리와 함께 상호연계성 기반의 관리도 매우 중요하다. 이러한 측면에서 각 시설의 개별법 및 제도 등을 통하여 전문영역에서 체계화되고 정교화된 안전관리가 이루어지고 있다. 기본법에서는 시설단위를 넘어 연쇄효과나 공동대응 필요성을 고려하여 국가기반시설 지정 관리하도록 하고 있다. 그러나 현재 국가기반시설 보호계획 및 평가는 시설단위 중심에서 크게 벗어나지 못하고 있다. 따라서 본 연구에서 국가기반시설의 상호의존도매트릭스를 작성 및 활용하여 광역정전 시 재난영향분석을 실시하였다. 이를 통하여 국가기반시설의 상호연계성 분석에 상호의존도매트릭스의 활용가능성을 확인하였다. Critical Infrastructure (CI) needs individual unit management and interdependency-based management because of their importance. So each CI is exquisitely and systematically managed under the related laws and regulations in terms of individual unit. But it is deficient to manage CI on the basis of Interdependency. Although "Disaster and Safety Management Fundamental Act" requires that CI is designated and managed in the light of cascade effect, coordinated response and individual unit, CI is primarily evaluated and protection plan is drawn-up by individual unit up to now. Thus this research suggested connectivity analysis methodology and drew up interdependency matrix through overseas case study. Furthermore this research analyzed disaster consequence on the basis of CI interdependency with consideration for blackout case and found out that interdependency matrix is useful to analyze relation among CI.

Port vulnerability assessment from the perspective of critical infrastructure interdependency

The increasing damages and losses bring requests to improve coping capacities for extreme conditions on the identification of and improvement to socioeconomic vulnerabilities. Disruptions to critical infrastructure (CI) influence the capacities for resilience and sustainable daily operations both directly and by causing failures in one system that in turn affects other systems. Among the transportation systems widely identified as national CI that should be protected, ports provide substantial employment, industrial activity, along with national and regional development. This study thus examines the vulnerability of port failures from an interdependency perspective. Fourteen vulnerable factors are developed by literatures as well as in-depth interviews. Four international commercial ports in Taiwan are employed as empirical cases to evaluate port vulnerability through semi-quantitatively systematic methods, including fuzzy cognitive maps and sensitivity model, while geographic information systems are used to clarify the spatial-functional interdependency. In addition to the underestimated vulnerability because of omitted interdependency, analytical results reveal that capacity and efficiency significantly affect port vulnerability. Increasing local cargo bases and co-opetition are suggested to improve the port vulnerability. The proposed assessment framework helps decision-makers understand the interdependent vulnerabilities and adopt appropriate strategies for the mitigation of losses.

Trust Based Interdependency Weighting for On-Line Risk Monitoring in Interdependent Critical Infrastructures

Critical infrastructure (CI) services are constantly consumed by the society and are not expected to fail. A common definition states that CIs are so vital to our society that a disruption would have a severe impact on both the society and the economy. CI sectors include, amongst others, electricity, telecommunication and transport. CIs can be mutually dependent on each others services and a failure in one of these elements can cascade to another (inter)dependent CI. CI security modelling was introduced in previous work to enable on-line risk monitoring in CIs that depend on each other by exchanging risk alerts expressed in terms of a breach of Confidentiality, a breach of Integrity and degrading Availability (C,I,A). While generally providing a solid basis for risk monitoring, there is no way of evaluating if a risk alert received from an external CI is accurate. In this paper the authors propose a solution to this problem by adding a trust based component to the CI security model in order to improve its accuracy and resilience to inconsistent or inaccurate risk alerts provided by (inter)dependent CIs, allowing to evaluate the correctness of the received alerts. The proposed approach is validated on a realistic scenario by evaluating a dependency between the computing and the telecommunication sectors in the context of the Grid'5000 platform.

An amendment to “Distributed synchronization under uncertainty: A fuzzy approach”

In a recent work we provided a framework for the synchronization of Critical Infrastructure Interdependency models with fuzzy state. In such a paper, however, a too restrictive condition is given, in that the possibility to synchronize the interdependency models without disclosing sensitive information is not completely feasible. In this note we provide an amendment providing a solution to the problem.

Constructing Resilient Futures: Integrating UK multi-stakeholder transport and energy resilience for 2050

The 2005 terrorist attacks in London and 2007 flooding throughout the UK revealed the shortcomings of the UK Government approach of ‘governing through resilience’ in practice: low levels of stakeholder co-ordination, lack of understanding about critical infrastructure interdependencies, and little attention to long-term adaptation. We found that developing futures scenarios coupled with natural and malicious hazard episodes provided an effective way to draw in key stakeholders to engage with and address these problems. Starting with a detailed analysis of extant futures studies, scenarios were combined with episodes in order to both draw stakeholders out of their institutional contexts by setting the exercise in the future and to elicit participant responses during future crisis events. A procedure was developed and applied to construct integrated scenario-episodes built upon existing scenarios in order to investigate multi-stakeholder interactions around the resilience of energy and transport infrastructures. The full resulting scenario-episode narratives are also presented. These scenario-narratives were applied in key stakeholder focus groups to address the gaps in the aforementioned ‘governing through resilience’. Participants actively engaged with these scenario-episodes in order to highlight overlapping conceptualisations of ‘resilience’, identify critical infrastructure interdependencies, and reflect deeper and more collaboratively on the longer-term resilience implications.

Comprehensive Approach to Security Risk Management in Critical Infrastructures and Supply Chains

The ability to assess and therefore react to risk exposure in critical infrastructures and supply chains environments greatly contributes to reaching suitable protection levels and response mechanisms. Due to the unavoidable interdependencies among those infrastructures, that allow disruptions to spread from one to another and likely cause a great impact on society’s welfare state, risk management might be seen as a common and shared concern. The Comprehensive Risk Management approach tries to face this process by gathering information from a broad range of disciplines (physical and logical security, safety, environmental threats, etc.) while taking into account interdependencies of critical infrastructures and supply chains at different layers, going from critical infrastructure operators point of view, to sectoral, national and finally supranational levels. Besides, risk assessment and management processes rely on accurate and timely information to assist decision making, but this information (security holes, attacks or even disruptions suffered by an infrastructure or supply chain)—due to its sensitiveness—does not easily flow between involved or interested parties. This paper provides an analysis of this situation and suggest future fields of action, supported by conclusions drawn from the FOCUS project.

Aware online interdependency modelling via evidence theory

Critical infrastructure interdependency models are typically used in a simulation-based perspective, in order to perform ‘what if?’ analyses and identify structural vulnerabilities in a dynamic perspective. While in the literature some attempts have been made to use interdependency models at real time, such approaches are flawed by the inability to properly determine the ongoing situation. Such models, typically, receive data from SCADA systems, which are mostly able to assess the effects of failures rather than the causes, while knowing the typology of failure would increase dramatically the predictive-ability of online interdependency models. In this paper, a situation awareness framework is provided with the aim to complement online interdependency models by providing more specific information on the causes of the outages highlighted by sensor data. In order to determine such causes, in this paper a transferable belief model representation is adopted to increase the awareness of interdependency models on fault causes. Moreover in this paper some of the limitations of evidence theory methods are highlighted and discussed, with particular reference to a real time context, providing some insights on how to overcome them, especially the closed-world assumption.

Designing evolvable systems in a framework of robust, resilient and sustainable engineering analysis

“Evolvability” is a concept normally associated with biology or ecology, but recent work on control of interdependent critical infrastructures reveals that network informatics systems can be designed to enable artificial, human systems to “evolve”. To explicate this finding, we draw on an analogy between disruptive behavior and stable variation in the history of science and the adaptive patterns of robustness and resilience in engineered systems. We present a definition of an evolvable system in the context of a model of robust, resilient and sustainable systems. Our review of this context and standard definitions indicates that many analysts in engineering (as well as in biology and ecology) do not differentiate Resilience from Robustness. Neither do they differentiate overall dependable system adaptability from a multi-phase process that includes graceful degradation and time-constrained recovery, restabilization, and prevention of catastrophic failure.We analyze how systemic Robustness, Resilience, and Sustainability are related to Evolvability. Our analysis emphasizes the importance of Resilience as an adaptive capability that integrates Sustainability and Robustness to achieve Evolvability.This conceptual framework is used to discuss nine engineering principles that should frame systems thinking about developing evolvable systems. These principles are derived from Kevin Kelly’s book: Out of Control, which describes living and artificial self-sustaining systems. Kelly’s last chapter, “The Nine Laws of God,” distills nine principles that govern all life-like systems. We discuss how these principles could be applied to engineering evolvability in artificial systems. This discussion is motivated by a wide range of practical problems in engineered artificial systems. Our goal is to analyze a few examples of system designs across engineering disciplines to explicate a common framework for designing and testing artificial systems. This framework highlights managing increasing complexity, intentional evolution, and resistance to disruptive events. From this perspective, we envision a more imaginative and time-sensitive appreciation of the evolution and operation of “reliable” artificial systems. We conclude with a short discussion of two hypothetical examples of engineering evolvable systems in network-centric communications using Error Resilient Data Fusion (ERDF) and cognitive radio.

Time-Varying Input-Output Inoperability Model

AbstractRepresenting interdependent critical infrastructures is mandatory for implementing protection policies and strategies. Among the several interdependency models provided over the years, the input-output inoperability model (IIM) has attracted widespread attention due to its simplicity and compactness. Such a model can emphasize cascading effects induced in a complex scenario by dependencies and interdependencies; however, the model is typically set up based on economic data, and the stationary assumption greatly reduces the applicability of the framework. These aspects are crude approximations due to the intrinsic limits of the methodology. Indeed, in modeling realistic scenarios, the coupling of different infrastructures and sectors is expected to increase with outage duration. In this paper, a different formulation of the IIM is proposed where time-varying interdependency coefficients are considered. Such coefficients are defined to explicitly account for the severity and duration of negative phe...

A three-phase framework for elicitation of infrastructure requirements

Many of the current traditional system engineering (TSE) approaches for elicitation of requirements are insufficient when deployed in complex situations. TSE approach to requirement elicitation is based on assumption of stable environmental conditions. However, the elicitation of requirements for complex systems (i.e., interdependent critical infrastructures) requires innovative approaches that should go beyond technical aspects of a situation. Complex situations arise when multiple complex infrastructures interdependently interact to provide goods and services for public health and safety. The elicitation of requirements for such a system must consider the nature of system of interest, its environment and system observer. On this backdrop, this paper reviews complexity associated with attained requirements for complex infrastructures, failures and provides an overview of a proposed high-level framework for infrastructure requirement elicitation.

Seismic risk assessment of interdependent critical infrastructure systems: The case of European gas and electricity networks

AbstractWe study the seismic vulnerability of the interdependent European gas and electricity transmission networks from a topological point of view, whereby the electricity network depends on the gas network through gas‐fired power plants. First, we assessed the seismic response for each independent network; then we analyzed the increased vulnerability due to their interdependency. We implemented a probabilistic reliability model that encompasses the spatial distribution of both network structures and their seismic hazard exposure using a Geographic Information System. We characterized the network interdependency using the strength of coupling of the interconnections, together with the seismic response of the independent—gas—network. We calculated the network fragility curves of the independent and dependent networks in terms of various performance measures (connectivity loss, power loss, and impact on the population) and found that the gas network is more seismically vulnerable than the electricity network. The interdependency introduces an extra vulnerability to the electricity network response that decreases with the extensiveness of the networks' damage states. Damage was also evaluated at a local level in order to identify the most vulnerable parts of the network, where it was found that the potential for the highest power loss is located in southeast Europe. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Quantitative estimates of critical infrastructures' interdependencies on the communication and information technology infrastructure

Interdependencies of critical infrastructures on communications and information technology infrastructure (CITI) are known collectively as cyber interdependency, which has significant impact on many critical infrastructures. However, till now no formal relationship has been proposed to estimate cyber interdependencies. In this paper, we present a set of empirical functions to represent cyber interdependencies for different critical infrastructures. Our approach is based on identifying important CITI services for each of these infrastructures and systematically ranking them according to their contribution to the infrastructures’ output. The description of interdependencies between infrastructure entities in functional form is rooted in system theory and is an essential component of computational modelling and simulation. The work presented in this paper is a pioneering attempt to formalise cyber interdependencies for different critical infrastructures from a system engineering approach.

Workshop Builds Strategies to Address Global Positioning System Vulnerabilities

Workshop Builds Strategies to Address Global Positioning System Vulnerabilities

Vulnerability analysis of interdependent critical infrastructures: case study of the Swedish railway system

Critical infrastructures provide essential services which enable our society to function. Disruptions in infrastructures can have widespread effects, not only for the originating infrastructure but also, through mutual dependencies, for other infrastructures. Identifying vulnerabilities inherent in these system-of-systems is thus highly critical for the proactive management and avoidance of future crises. A modelling approach for interdependent technical infrastructures is proposed and three perspectives for the analysis of vulnerabilities are introduced, addressing the complexities associated with comprehensively analysing technical interdependent infrastructures. An empirical analysis of the railway system in southern Sweden is conducted, a system consisting of seven interdependent supporting systems. It is concluded that the proposed modelling approach and the three perspectives of vulnerability analysis give valuable insights for the proactive risk management of technical infrastructures.