Today's society relies greatly upon an array of complex national and international infrastructure networks, such as transportation, utilities, telecommunication, and even financial networks. While modeling and simulation tools have provided insight into the behavior of individual infrastructure networks, a far less understood area is that of the interrelationships among multiple infrastructure networks including the potential cascading effects that may result due to these interdependencies. This paper first describes infrastructure interdependencies, as well as presenting a formalization of interdependency types. Next the paper describes a modeling and simulation framework called CIMS © and the work that is being conducted at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to model and simulate infrastructure interdependencies and the complex behaviors that can result. In these days of National Security concerns following the 9/11 attacks and in the wake of the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the discussion of the protection and restoration of "Critical Infrastructures" has risen as a national concern and research area. The U.S. Patriot Act defines critical infrastructure as "systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters" (U.S. The focus of this research, however, is not with individual infrastructures, but with the intertwining of resources and information demands that exist between them. Advances in information technology (IT) and the necessity to improve efficiency have resulted in infrastructures that have become increasingly automated and interlinked. Most modern commercial infrastructures are composed of a collection of interconnected networks (both physical and computer based) that serve different purposes and have different owners. Indeed, even parts of the information residing on a single sub-network may have different purposes and different owners. Critical information and controls are passed between these component elements to coordinate necessary functions. The complexity and interdependency of these critical resource flows introduces nuances and potential vulnerabilities into the infrastructure. Natural disasters, deliberate attacks or accidental system failures within infrastructures may result in cascading effects that are neither readily apparent nor immediately understood. This paper examines the issues of interdependency modeling, simulation and analysis. The remainder of section one discusses infrastructures further. Section two examines infrastructure interdependencies and provides formalism for these dependencies. Section three then presents a software framework named the Critical Infrastructure Modeling System (CIMS © ) which is used at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) for critical infrastructure interdependency analysis.
Dudenhoeffer et al. propose the CIMS framework for infrastructure interdependency modeling and analysis REF .
CIMS: a framework for infrastructure interdependency modeling and analysis
WSC '06
Computer Science