Title: High-level modelling of critical infrastructures' interdependencies

Authors: Simon Delamare, Alpha-Amadou Diallo, Claude Chaudet

Addresses: GET/ENST – LTCI UMR 5141, 46 rue Barrault, 75013 Paris, France. ' GET/ENST – LTCI UMR 5141, 46 rue Barrault, 75013 Paris, France. ' GET/ENST – LTCI UMR 5141, 46 rue Barrault, 75013 Paris, France.

Abstract: Due to the increasing demand in services| quality and the growing concerns about external threats, the protection of critical infrastructures has recently become a major concern. In this article, we study the potential effect of interdependencies that may occur between two of these infrastructures: the telecommunication networks and the electrical network. In the absence of side protection mechanisms such as multihoming or batteries, these types of networks highly depend on each other. A failure of some component in one of these architectures may cause a fault in the other, for example, when an electrical outage occurs, routers may be switched off as soon as their battery has depleted. This can lead to cross-domain cascading effects in failures propagation that cause general service unavailabilty. To understand this phenomena, we propose a model that describes the behaviour of these interdependent systems. We show on realistic topologies that simple failures can lead to failures propagation and we derive the potential risk scenarios.

Keywords: critical infrastructures; modelling; system interdependencies; electrical networks; telecommunication networks; cross-domain cascading; cascading failures; failure propagation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIS.2009.022852

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2009 Vol.5 No.1/2, pp.100 - 119

Published online: 30 Jan 2009 *

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