Critical Infrastructure Services Research Articles

Visualizing climate change flood risks to community-centric critical infrastructure and local emergency services in the Great Lakes region: Metrics and insights

Visualizing climate change flood risks to community-centric critical infrastructure and local emergency services in the Great Lakes region: Metrics and insights

Efficiency and consumer welfare under retail electricity deregulation: Analysis of Ohio's retail choice markets

AbstractMany critical infrastructure services operate under either price regulation or deregulated systems. The grand policy experiment of deregulation has been heavily studied, but evaluations have been limited at the retail level where end‐user prices are often difficult to obtain. This paper presents an in‐depth look at the retail market for electricity in a retail deregulated, or restructured, market—Ohio. We build and introduce a comprehensive SQL database of every daily filed retail electricity offer over a 9‐year period of study, over two‐million records. We integrate this data with other external data sources and conduct a detailed descriptive analysis of market prices as observed by end consumers at the retail level. We find that the lion's share of “competitive” retail electricity choice offers are more costly to consumers than the utility's default service rate and have higher markups over the wholesale price, and we find that when prices exceed the default rate they do so by a considerably larger margin than when consumers observe savings. We also find that even well‐informed consumers are able to find a welfare‐improving rate relative to the default rate between only 43% and 59% of the time. We conclude with a discussion of implications and root economic causes of the efficiency and consumer welfare problems we observe.

Developing an Emergency Medical Services Resilience Assessment Tool in Climate Change: A Study Protocol.

Climate change poses significant threats to the health and safety of communities worldwide. Extreme weather events can disrupt critical infrastructure and overwhelm emergency medical services (EMS) systems. As the frequency and intensity of these climate-related disasters continue to increase, it is essential that EMS organizations develop robust strategies to enhance their resilience. One important step in building climate-resilient EMS systems is the development of comprehensive assessment tools. Developing a comprehensive tool for assessing the resilience of EMS in the face of climate change. This research employs an applied, mixed-methods approach to investigate the development and validation of the Emergency Medical Services Resilience Assessment (EMSRA) tool. The study will be executed across four key phases: (a) A scoping review will be conducted to identify the global dimensions and components of EMS systems that demonstrate resilience to the impacts of climate change. (b) A qualitative study, involving semistructured interviews, will be undertaken to explore the specific dimensions and components of EMS resilience within the Iranian context. (c) Based on the findings from the scoping review and qualitative inquiry, assessment items related to EMS resilience in climate change will be extracted and synthesized to develop a pilot version of the EMSRA tool. (d) The pilot EMSRA tool will undergo a rigorous process of quantitative and qualitative validation, including an evaluation of its psychometric properties, to assess the resilience of EMS systems in the face of climate-related challenges. The development of EMSRA tool will enable the assessment and enhancement of climate change resilience within the national and provincial EMS systems, providing critical data to inform evidence-based strategies and plans for strengthening EMS against the impacts of severe climate changes.

PROGRESS: the sectoral approach to cyber resilience

Each critical infrastructure and vital service represents a unique instance of a complex socio-technical–economic system. Resilience in complex systems is an emergent behaviour that occurs from interactions between components and is not easily predictable from understanding each component in isolation. Yet, cybersecurity practice and maturity models still focus on the robustness of separate components: organizational units, firms, or IT applications. Such a fundamental mismatch between theory and tools is among the causes of pervasive cyber insecurity. We introduce the sectoral capability maturity model to enable a comprehensive improvement of systemic resilience. The promoting global cyber resilience for sectors cyber-capability maturity model incorporates the science of complex systems, cybersecurity frameworks, and two decades of CIP operations experience. The model was successfully applied in resilience assessment projects in a dozen countries. Real-life experience emphasizes the benefits of the sectoral approach to cyber resilience: creating feedback loops within the sector, integrating supply chain and third-party risks, facilitating information flows between stakeholders, enabling cooperation with and among ministries, departments and other authorities, weighting in the links and processes between actors in cybersecurity issues. The established value of the sectoral approach calls for applications that will improve the resilience of essential services while lowering sector-wide cybersecurity expenditures.

Improving community understanding of cascading effects of critical infrastructure service failure: An experimental interactive learning process

Effective disaster preparedness relies on the community's understanding of hazards and risks, emphasizing the need to address cascading effects from critical infrastructure failures due to natural hazards. Understanding cascading effects in communities facing multiple hazards is crucial due to the increasing complexity of critical infrastructure (CI) services. Limited awareness can amplify vulnerabilities and socioeconomic losses, and thus capacity building at the community level is essential for reducing hazard risks. This study utilized an interactive learning process (ILP), a participatory approach to engage the community in sharing experiences and building coping capacity for cascading effects. ILP was facilitated through facilitator-learner interaction and participatory exercises, aided by visualisation tools that enriched the learning experience of participants. The use of visualisation tools in ILP simplified comprehension of intricate interdependencies, helping participants to brainstorm and think critically to explore potential solutions. We explore the effectiveness of three visualisation tools that support the ILPs in improving community understanding of the cascading effects. Through experimentation and comparison, insights are gained into how learners engage with different ILPs and their impact on overall learning outcomes. The study concluded by selecting the visualisation tool supporting ILP that was effective in fostering engagement, improving understanding, and promoting knowledge retention.

A practical method for functional recovery analysis based on seismic resilience assessment of city building portfolios

Enhancing the seismic resilience of city building portfolios represents a pivotal strategy for mitigating the adverse effects of earthquakes. A practical method for functional recovery analysis is proposed to quantitatively assess the seismic resilience of city building portfolios. The proposed method involves quantifying delay time and developing repair scheduling schemes. The delay time considers the dependencies of normal functioning buildings on infrastructure service availability and road accessibility. It emphasizes the varying demands of buildings for critical versus general infrastructure services. The repair scheduling scheme, conducted in two steps, employs a rational repair priority index that integrates the post-earthquake residual functionality, service capacity, and relative importance of buildings. This scheme prioritizes the repair of life-rescue-related buildings, distinguishes the repair sequence for different occupancy types of buildings, and reflects the principles of local governments in repair decision-making. The effectiveness of this practical method is demonstrated through a case study. Recovery curves are compared under different earthquake scenarios and levels of labor force constraints. The concept of normalized time is introduced to allow for a comparative assessment of seismic resilience across different recovery scenarios in a more practical manner. The results can provide valuable guidance for formulating pre-earthquake risk reduction strategies, developing post-earthquake functional recovery schemes, and constructing more resilient cities.

Cascading Effects of Critical Infrastructures in a Flood Scenario: A Case Study in the City of Cologne

Critical infrastructures, which constitute the backbone of our modern society, are increasingly exposed to natural hazards. Loss of performance or failure of a critical infrastructure can lead to cascading effects that affect even more services and citizens. Floods, as one of the most prominent natural hazards, are prone to affect multiple critical infrastructures at once, making it even more difficult to assess combined effects of these (cascading) disruptions. Hospitals are especially vulnerable in a flood scenario, as they are reliant on multiple other infrastructures, such as power and water supply or the road network. In order to prepare for upcoming events, sophisticated analysis tools are required that are capable of modeling the spatial extent of flood induced disruptions and their impact on critical infrastructure services. In this work, we present a proof of concept that focuses on the impact of multiple disruptions on hospitals. We conducted a case study on an extreme flood scenario in the city of Cologne (Germany). Historically, Cologne has proven vulnerable to river-floods, as thousands of people were affected through floods in in 1993 and 1995. The approach is based on a combination of I) a geographic information system, which makes the extent of disruptions spatially explicit and II) a Bayesian network, which is used to assess the impact of one or multiple disruptions on a single hospital. We present a work-in-progress approach in this work. The results generated using this approach enable a first comparative overview of the expected level of services of the examined hospitals.

A systematic review of optimization methods for recovery planning in cyber–physical infrastructure networks: Current state and future trends

Cyber–Physical Systems are increasingly complex and frequently integrated into modern societies via critical infrastructure systems, products, and services. Consequently, there is a need for reliable functionality of these complex systems under various scenarios, from physical failures due to aging to cyber attacks. However, the development of effective strategies to restore disrupted cyber–physical infrastructure systems continues to be a major challenge. Even though there have been an increasing number of papers evaluating recovery planning in cyber–physical infrastructures networks, a comprehensive literature review focusing on mathematical modeling and optimization methods is still lacking. Thus, this study critically analyzes the literature on optimization techniques for recovery planning of cyber–physical infrastructure networks after a disruption, to synthesize key findings on the current methods in this domain. A total of 152 relevant research papers are reviewed following an extensive assessment of all major scientific databases. The main mathematical modeling practices and optimization methods are identified for both deterministic and stochastic formulations, categorizing them based on the solution approach (exact, heuristic, metaheuristic), objective function, and network size. Having identified the gaps, a set of future trends for both the methodology and application of optimization algorithms is presented. Overall, there is a need to shift toward scalable optimization solution algorithms, empowered by data-driven methods and machine learning algorithms, to provide reliable and computationally efficient decision-support systems for decision-makers and practitioners.

A qualitative analysis of cascading effects of critical infrastructure service failure post torrential floods in formal & informal settlement: the study-case of Medellin city, Colombia

ABSTRACT Critical infrastructure (CI) services are crucial to the functioning of modern communities, and a single CI failure can cause cascading effects through a network of services, impacting an entire city. Challenges such as climate change and rapid urbanisation are increasing the risk of cascading effects of CI failure, particularly impacting the urban poor in peri-urban and informal settlements. This study uses a systems thinking approach to validate the hypothesis if CI services are susceptible to generating severe cascading effects in informal than formal settlements. Qualitative data was collected on cascading effects via interviews and focus group discussion in a formal and an informal settlement in Medellin, Colombia. The responses were analysed and structured using a service chain framework and a Causal Loop Diagram. Our findings show that cascading effects vary between the formal and informal contexts concerning CI service availability and accessibility and may be attributed to differences in demography, geography, socio-economic development, risk regulations, community coping capacities and other factors associated with urban development.

Ризики критичної інфраструктури країни

The aim of the article is to improve the classification and systematization of risks of the country's critical infrastructure based on the study of world experience. Analyzing and summarizing the world's scientific and practical achievements regarding approaches to the classification and systematization of critical infrastructure risks, it was found that, despite slightly different approaches to their classification and systematization, a certain similarity is also traced, but still, taking into account the growth in the number and variety of risks, their classification and systematization need to be improved. As a result of the study, a classification and systematization of risks of the country's critical infrastructure has been proposed, which includes a number of features: by the level of occurrence; by belonging to critical infrastructure facilities and services; by the nature of the impact; by source of origin; by sector of occurrence. The classification and systematization of risks is necessary in order to better design, plan and implement measures and investments that will limit, neutralize or avoid negative consequences (energy, social, economic, etc.) arising from the impacts of risks. Prospects for further research in this direction are approaches to assessing the financial, economic and social consequences of possible and real risks to the country?s critical infrastructure, taking into account the cascading nature of modern risks.

Defending Root DNS Servers against DDoS Using Layered Defenses (Extended)

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks exhaust resources, leaving a server unavailable to legitimate clients. The Domain Name System (DNS) is a frequent target of DDoS attacks. Since DNS is a critical infrastructure service, protecting it from DoS is imperative. Many prior approaches have focused on specific filters or anti-spoofing techniques to protect generic services. DNS root nameservers are more challenging to protect, since they use fixed IP addresses, serve very diverse clients and requests, receive predominantly UDP traffic that can be spoofed, and must guarantee high quality of service. In this paper we propose a layered DDoS defense for DNS root nameservers. Our defense uses a library of defensive filters, which can be optimized for different attack types, with different levels of selectivity. We further propose a method that automatically and continuously evaluates and selects the best combination of filters throughout the attack. We show that this layered defense approach provides exceptional protection against all attack types using traces of ten real attacks from a DNS root nameserver. Our automated system can select the best defense within seconds and quickly reduces traffic to the server within a manageable range, while keeping collateral damage lower than 2%. We show our system can successfully mitigate resource exhaustion using replay of a real-world attack. We can handle millions of filtering rules without noticeable operational overhead.

Kora: A Cloud-Native Event Streaming Platform for Kafka

Event streaming is an increasingly critical infrastructure service used in many industries and there is growing demand for cloud-native solutions. Confluent Cloud provides a massive scale event streaming platform built on top of Apache Kafka with tens of thousands of clusters running in 70+ regions across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. This paper introduces Kora , the cloud-native platform for Apache Kafka at the core of Confluent Cloud. We describe Kora's design that enables it to meet its cloud-native goals, such as reliability, elasticity, and cost efficiency. We discuss Kora's abstractions which allow users to think in terms of their workload requirements and not the underlying infrastructure, and we discuss how Kora is designed to provide consistent, predictable performance across cloud environments with diverse capabilities.

DNS4EU: a step change in the EU’s strategic autonomy?

ABSTRACT The Domain Name System (DNS) is vital to the internet, enabling everyday uses such as browsing, emailing and chatting. One function in particular – the DNS resolution, performed by resolver operators – allows us to reach what we are looking for online. The market of recursive resolution is highly dynamic and is currently shifting towards open or public resolvers, which tend to belong to large tech companies. In 2022, the European Commission launched the DNS4EU initiative, which established a European resolver as part of the new EU cybersecurity strategy, in order to respond to the resilience, security and privacy needs of the union. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the DNS4EU project, which provided seed funding to a European competitor in a market increasingly dominated by non-EU players. As a critical infrastructure service, the DNS4EU represents one of the first concrete steps towards enhancing the strategic autonomy of the union. But it also constitutes an unprecedented public intervention in a largely private market relying on voluntary adoption. This article contextualises the DNS4EU initiative, outlining both advantages and limitations of the European strategy and related tender process and implementation plan, concluding with a discussion on the future of DNS resolution.

Needs for Portfolio Risk Assessment of Aging Dams in the United States

Dam failure can cause extraordinary flooding. Water and wastewater treatment plants, electricity generation facilities, bridges, highways, population centers, and other dams often lie downstream of a dam. If poorly maintained, aging dams can be overtopped by extreme rainfall events, and long-term loss of critical infrastructure services for many communities and regions may result. Such events are now more likely as the climate changes. How should we prioritize dams that need immediate attention and retrofit or remove them? Losses from a dam failure could exceed the infrastructure’s replacement costs, through cascading effects in multiple sectors such as electricity, transportation, water supply, and environmental services. The existing dam hazard classification frameworks in the US and many other countries do not formally characterize “hazard hotspots” considering these impacts. Given that there are over 90,000 dams at different stages of repair, maintenance, and budgetary constraints, a systematic approach is needed to rank their potential failure hazard and allocate resources for risk mitigation. In this paper, we synthesize an approach for preliminary ranking of the priority areas of concern. The approach is scalable over many regions for rapid assessment of magnitude and exposure of a dam failure. The estimation of the consequences of a dam failure, including its financial losses, as well as affected critical infrastructures and population, is explored using publicly available dam break and consequence tools as well as national infrastructure data sets.

HOW THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR MAY CHANGE THE CYBERCRIME ECOSYSTEM

According to statistics, in recent years there has been an increase in cyber-attacks and their negative impact on individuals, organizations, and governments. Cyber attackers have acquired the resources and expertise to launch massive attacks against other nations to gain strategic advantages, mainly targeting critical infrastructure and public services. Current geopolitical events, through the action launched by the Russian Federation in Ukraine, demonstrate that cyber security threats are ever greater. States’ responses to these challenges must be quick and effective, adapted to this context. Over the past year, Russian cybercrime groups have strengthened their position as threats to the global digital ecosystem, demonstrating adaptability, persistence, and a willingness to exploit computer systems. This paper will analyze how cybercrime groups have been more present in the international space due to this war, as well as the importance given to them due to the types of attacks launched and their division into belligerent support camps.

Analysis and Evaluation of Business Continuity Measures Employed in Critical Infrastructure during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The purpose of the presented research was to determine the effectiveness and sufficiency of measures put in place to protect the business continuity of critical infrastructure (CI) and key services (KSs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The wide variety of research conducted in the area of business continuity maintenance during the COVID-19 pandemic does not change the fact that there is still a research gap in this area, particularly in terms of issues related to CI and KS protection. A systematic review of scientific publications revealed the need for continued research into this topic given the fact that only 19 papers related to CI continuity and 8 directly to KS operators could be identified. Holistic and interdisciplinary research is particularly needed to organize and systematize the existing scientific knowledge on the subject, and in practical terms, help organizations and institutions to better prepare for future continuity disruptions. A survey conducted between March and May 2021 among entities operating in Poland and classified as critical infrastructure operators as well as key service operators, subcontractors, and suppliers crucial to maintaining the continuity of critical infrastructure operations revealed that entrepreneurs, surprised by the speed and aggressive nature of the pandemic, mainly resorted to protective measures that were immediately available, standard solutions that did not require excessive financial and organizational effort. But in the face of long-term pandemic threat, such measures may no longer be sufficient, so it is important to intensify research into those precautions that require readaptation of work organization and organizational processes to protect key workers, increase supply chain resilience, and protect the work process.

Dissecting heterogeneous pathways to disparate household-level impacts due to infrastructure service disruptions

The objective of this study is to empirically and systematically assess the combination of inherent susceptibility factors, protective actions, and factors of hazard exposure that influence a household's level of hardship experienced due to disruptions in critical infrastructure services during disasters. Classification and regression tree (CART) decision tree models and survey data from three major hurricane events were used to: (1) identify the pathways leading to impact(s) due to service disruptions and explore the differences in pathways across vulnerable population groups; and (2) identify the points of intervention to mitigate well-being impacts in households due to disruptions in water, energy, food, and road transportation services. The results reveal how the associative pathways between these factors change between socioeconomic and demographic groups in the impacted community and for different infrastructure service system types. The findings suggest that not all vulnerable households experienced high hardship outcomes despite prolonged outages. Finally, the hardship pathways suggest recommendations for improving resilience in infrastructure systems in a more equitable manner. The findings can be used by emergency and infrastructure managers and operators to better prioritize resource allocation for hazard mitigation investments and restorations. Accordingly, this study contributes to the theory of human-centric infrastructure resilience.

Multi-Agent Based Stochastic Dynamical Model to Measure Community Resilience

Emergency services and utilities need appropriate planning tools to analyze and improve infrastructure and community resilience to disasters. Recognized as a key metric of community resilience is the social well-being of a community during a disaster, which is made up of mental and physical social health. Other factors influencing community resilience directly or indirectly are emotional health, emergency services, and the availability of critical infrastructures services, such as food, agriculture, water, transportation, electric power, and communications system. It turns out that in computational social science literature dealing with community resilience, the role of these critical infrastructures along with some important social characteristics is not considered. To address these weaknesses, we develop a new multi-agent based stochastic dynamical model, standardized by overview, design concepts, details, and decision (ODD+D) protocol and derived from neuro-science, psychological and social sciences, to measure community resilience in terms of mental and physical well-being. Using this model, we analyze the micro-macro level dependence between the emergency services and power systems and social characteristics such as fear, risk perception, information-seeking behaviour, cooperation, flexibility, empathy, and experience, in an artificial society. Furthermore, we simulate this model in two case studies and show that a high level of flexibility, experience, and cooperation enhances community resilience. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

ПРОБЛЕМИ ТА ПОТЕНЦІАЛ ВІДНОВЛЕННЯ ПІДПРИЄМСТВ СФЕРИ БУДІВНИЦТВА В АСПЕКТІ ВІЙСЬКОВОЇ АГРЕСІЇ РОСІЇ

The article is devoted to the identification of modern problems and the determination of the potential for restoration of enterprises in the field of construction in Ukraine during the military aggression of russia. The authors identified the main problems associated with the process of restoration of Ukraine after the end of hostilities. It has been proven that the main participants in this process will be construction companies, namely enterprises manufacturing building materials. The article also describes the general state of the business environment, while the authors used various indices, in particular the Business Activity Index, which shows business activity, its ability to increase turnover, create jobs, etc. It is worth noting that the authors of the work managed to establish that the state of enterprises in Ukraine varies significantly depending on the region, size and industry, which should be taken into account when forming a strategy for supporting entrepreneurship and rebuilding Ukraine at different levels of management. It has been proven that in the sectoral section: construction and art, sports, entertainment and recreation - 60% have stopped or almost stopped their activities; real estate transactions - about 55% The priority of problems for enterprises in the construction sector has been established. The main ones include: rising prices for raw materials and materials; supply of critical infrastructure services; logistics Summarizing and comparing the problems identified during surveys using different methods showed that they are correlated with each other. In general, based on the research, the structure of losses and prospects in the field of construction materials production was formed. In the future, the field of building materials can be considered one of the most promising and rapidly growing, and experts estimate new markets in the millions of dollars. So, the authors have proven that construction enterprises face a large number of problems that are complex in nature, however, they remain the basis for attracting investors who are interested in investing in the production of construction materials and the development of related fields as profitable and dynamically growing.

People die in six ways and each is politics: Infrastructure and the possible

Critical infrastructure services determine where people can survive and what they can do with their survival. This fact conditions political possibilities at a fundamental level but remains underexplored in the literature. Those who wish to extend the boundaries of political action, or to win protections and the possibility of a new political community for themselves and others, should focus a substantial part of their energies and attention on developing alternative infrastructure systems for supporting human life. Without such systems, political action – no matter how revolutionary or ingenious – will ultimately find itself constrained by its position within the zones of survivability established by existing forms of infrastructure and by the hierarchies and configurations of power linked with those forms of infrastructure. As a result, those who wish to change current political and economic conditions should think of the capacity to take care of everyone as a condition for such change rather than its result.