Preliminary Interdependency Analysis (PIA): Method and tool support

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges in enhancing the protection of Critical Infrastructures (CIs) against accidents, natural disasters, and acts of terrorism is establishing and maintaining an understanding of the interdependencies between infrastructures. Understanding interdependencies is a challenge both for governments and for infrastructure owners/operators. Both, to a different extent, have an interest in services and tools that can enhance their risk assessment and management to mitigate large failures that may propagate across infrastructures. The abstract presents an approach (the method and tool support) to interdependency analysis developed recently by Centre for Software Reliability, City University London. The method progresses from a qualitative phase during which a fairly abstract model is built of interacting infrastructures. Via steps of incremental refinement more detailed models are built, which allow for quantifying interdependencies. The tool support follows the methodology and allows analysts to build quickly models at the appropriate level of abstraction (qualitative or very detailed including deterministic models specific for the particular domain, e.g. various flow models). The approach was successfully applied to a large scale case-study with more than 800 modeling elements. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.