Toward modeling and simulation of critical national infrastructure interdependencies

Modern society's physical health depends vitally upon a number of real, interdependent, critical infrastructure networks that deliver power, petroleum, natural gas, water, and communications. Its economic health depends on a number of other infrastructure networks, some virtual and some real, that link residences, industries, commercial sectors, and transportation sectors. The continued prosperity and national security of the US depends on our ability to understand the vulnerabilities of and analyze the performance of both the individual infrastructures and the entire interconnected system of infrastructures. Only then can we respond to potential disruptions in a timely and effective manner. Collaborative efforts among Sandia, other government agencies, private industry, and academia have resulted in realistic models for many of the individual component infrastructures. In this paper, we propose an innovative modeling and analysis framework to study the entire system of physical and economic infrastructures. That framework uses the existing individual models together with system dynamics, functional models, and nonlinear optimization algorithms. We describe this framework and demonstrate its potential use to analyze, and propose a response for, a hypothetical disruption.

Keywords:

• System dynamics
• IDEF
• critical infrastructure
• disruption evaluation

Notes

¹The economic impacts of recent Internet worms and power outages are in the billions of dollars.

²The National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center is a joint program at Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, funded and managed by the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Preparedness Directorate.

³Please consult http://www.idef.com for a discussion on these diagrams.