Integrating Resilience in Time-based Dependency Analysis: A Large-Scale Case Study for Urban Critical Infrastructures

Abstract

As critical systems shall withstand different types of perturbations affecting their functionalities and their service level, resilience is a very important requirement. Especially in an urban critical infrastructures where the occurrence of natural events may influence the state of other dependent infrastructures from various different sectors, the overall resilience of such infrastructures against large scale failures is even more important. When a perturbation occurs in a system, the quality (level) of the service provided by the affected system will be reduced and a recovery phase will be triggered to restore the system to its normal operation level. According to the implemented recovery controls, the restoration phase may follow a different growth model. This paper extends a previous time-based dependency risk analysis methodology by integrating and assessing the effect of recovery controls. The main goal is to dynamically assess the evolution of recovery over time, in order to identify how the expected recovery plans will eventually affect the overall risk of the critical paths. The proposed recovery-aware time-based dependency analysis methodology was integrated into the CIPCast Decision Support System that enables risk forecast due to natural events to identify vulnerable and disrupted assets (e.g., electric substations, telecommunication components) and measure the expected risk paths. Thus, CIPCast can be valuable to Critical Infrastructure Operators and other Emergency Managers involved in a crisis assessment to evaluate the effect of natural and anthropic threats affecting critical assets and plan proper countermeasures to reduce the overall risk of degradation of services. The proposed methodology is evaluated in a real scenario, which utilizes several infrastructures and Points of Interest of the city of Rome.