Describing smart city problems with distributed vulnerability

Abstract

Modern material and immaterial infrastructures have seen a growth of their complexity as well as the criticality of the role played in this interconnected society. Such a growth has brought to a need for protection in particular of vital services (e.g., electricity, water supply, computer networks, etc.). This chapter introduces the problem of defining in mathematical terms a useful definition of vulnerability for distributed and networked systems: this definition is then mapped onto the well-known formalism of Bayesian Networks. A demonstration of the applicability of this theoretical framework is given by describing the distributed plate car recognition problem, one of the possible faces of the smart city model.