Analyzing Cascading Effects in Interdependent Critical Infrastructures

Abstract

Critical Infrastructures (CIs) are resources that are essential for the performance of society, including its economy and its security. Large-scale disasters, whether natural or man-made, can have devastating primary (direct) effects on some CI and significant indirect effects (cascading effects) on other CIs, because CIs are interconnected and depend on each other's services. Recent work by Laugé et al. expressed the dependency values among CIs as dependency matrices for various durations of the primary CI failure. For better preparedness and mitigation of CI failures knowledge of the weak points in CI interdependencies is crucial. To this effect, we have developed a MATLAB code that identifies the forward paths and loops between pairs of CIs based on a simplified version of Laugé's matrices. The code calculates the parallel forward paths and loops dependencies to identify and quantify the amplification of cascading effects of any disruption that might hit one of the CIs included in the research. A main consequence, which has implications for expert assessment of dependencies between CIs, is that the cascading effects are not limited to the direct values expressed in the dependency matrices.

A Domain Ontology on Cascading Effects in Critical Infrastructures based on a Systematic Literature Review

“…However, there is general agreement that CIs include government, telecommunication based on ICT (information and communication technology); financial sector; energy supply; water transportation systems; health sector; and security services (first responders, police, military)." (Abdelgawad et al, 2018;Abdelgawad and Gonzalez, 2019) Table 2 Critical infrastructure definitions "When we consider CIs, we have to take into account that they are not simply 'physical' plants and networks. In fact, they contain not only a physical layer, but are also made of 'cyber' components and systems, and include human organisations that manage and supervise the daily operations of the infrastructure."…”

“…Deriving from the common points of the first two concepts found, cascading effects and CIs, the concept of critical infrastructure interdependencies, which concerns a 'mutual relationship between two or more infrastructures' (Brabcova et al, 2018), was then identified. With the increasing digitalisation and consequent linking of systems of CIs (Grafenauer et al, 2018), they are becoming more and more interconnected among each other (Franchina et al, 2008;Schauer et al, 2018), making them interdependent (Abdelgawad et al, 2018;Abdelgawad and Gonzalez, 2019;Rahnamay-Naeini and Hayat, 2016). Due to the interdependencies among CIs, the effects and the unfolding of a crisis in certain CIs become hard to predict (Hagen et al, 2015).…”

“…Critical infrastructure protection 'embodies the management of risk assessment, risk mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery against serious incidents threatening the critical infrastructure of a region or nation' (Abdelgawad et al, 2018). Thus, the critical infrastructure protection can take advantage of business continuity planning that according to ISO 22301, is defined as the 'strategic and tactical capability of the organisation to plan for and respond to incidents and business disruptions in order to continue business operations at an acceptable predefined level'.…”

“…However, there is general agreement that CIs include government, telecommunication based on ICT (information and communication technology); financial sector; energy supply; water transportation systems; health sector; and security services (first responders, police, military)." (Abdelgawad et al, 2018;Abdelgawad and Gonzalez, 2019) Critical infrastructures protection "Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) embodies the management of risk assessment, risk mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery against serious incidents threatening the critical infrastructure of a region or nation." (Abdelgawad et al, 2018) Cascading infrastructures interdependencies "An interdependency is a bidirectional relationship between infrastructures through which the state of each infrastructure is influenced by or correlated to the state of the other."…”

“…Research works in the area of CIs' interdependencies categorised them into four different categories: physical, cyber, geographic, and logical (Rinaldi, 2004). The fact that CIs are interdependent makes them vulnerable (Balducelli et al, 2008), meaning that a failure in one CIs can affect the functioning of another one (Abdelgawad et al, 2018). Consequently, a failure in one CIs can trigger more failures and effects in other CIs -an event which is called a cascading effect between CIs (Johansson et al, 2015).…”