Identifying, understanding, and analyzing critical infrastructure interdependencies

A conceptual framework for addressing infrastructure interdependencies is presented that could serve as the basis for further understanding and scholarship in this important area and is used to explore the challenges and complexities of interdependency.

Abstract

The notion that our nation's critical infrastructures are highly interconnected and mutually dependent in complex ways, both physically and through a host of information and communications technologies (so-called "cyberbased systems"), is more than an abstract, theoretical concept. As shown by the 1998 failure of the Galaxy 4 telecommunications satellite, the prolonged power crisis in California, and many other recent infrastructure disruptions, what happens to one infrastructure can directly and indirectly affect other infrastructures, impact large geographic regions and send ripples throughout the national a global economy. This article presents a conceptual framework for addressing infrastructure interdependencies that could serve as the basis for further understanding and scholarship in this important area. We use this framework to explore the challenges and complexities of interdependency. We set the stage for this discussion by explicitly defining the terms infrastructure, infrastructure dependencies, and infrastructure interdependencies and introducing the fundamental concept of infrastructures as complex adaptive systems. We then focus on the interrelated factors and system conditions that collectively define the six dimensions. Finally, we discuss some of the research challenges involved in developing, applying, and validating modeling and simulation methodologies and tools for infrastructure interdependency analysis.