Abstract-The paper discusses the main issues involved in a simulation of complex interdependent systems, which are a part of the Critical Infrastructure (CI). The purpose is to present a common architecture for simulation of critical infrastructure interdependencies in emergency situations. An analysis of the interdependencies between critical infrastructure elements and explanations of the process of development HLA/RTI (High Level Architecture/Run Time Infrastructure) simulations for study of CI elements are carried out. The approach provides a possibility of performing an assessment of the elements of the CI and their interdependencies affected by emergency situations as natural disasters.Index Terms-Critical infrastructure, HLA/RTI, distributed simulations, emergency situations, natural disasters.
I. INTRODUCTIONCritical Infrastructure (CI) elements comprise a lot of basic facilities, services, information systems, and communication networks needed for the functioning of a community or society. People are becoming more and more dependent from these resources and assets due to the critical operations and infrastructures they support [1]. However, the infrastructure objects are vulnerable to a variety of disruptions, ranging from mild (short-term power outage, disk drive failure) to severe (natural disaster, equipment destruction, fire). Moreover, the infrastructure elements have complex relationships and interdependencies that cross infrastructure boundaries. This fact increases the spectrum of the threads. It raises the question for effective emergency management that considers infrastructure interdependencies and vulnerability so that the appropriate control can be put into place to either prevent incidents from happenings or to limit the effect of an incident [2]. In addition to this, the complex interdependencies between the components resulting in the mutual provision of services and use of common communications network, these systems cannot be studied directly. For example, it is not possible to directly test the effect of controlled shut-down procedures for segments of the power grid, the spread of a computer virus, or the spread of a disease vector under different vaccination options without having potentially drastic economic, safety or health impacts. For infrastructure networks, replicating all or even a part of the physical infrastructure may be prohibitively expensive. In both these cases, computational modeling and Manuscript received December 9, 2015; revised March 23, 2016. This work was supported in part by the Bulgarian National Science Fund for the support under the Grant № DFNI-I02/ 15 from 2014.The authors are with the ISER, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia 1113, Bl. 2, Bulgaria (e-mail: g_tk@abv.bg, plamzlateva@abv.bg, gvelev@unwe.bg).simulation provides a safe and cost-effective alternative that can help enormously in developing needed understanding. The above-mentioned considerations show that the CI protection has to be a purpose not only of common strategies but also this problem...