Modelling Interdependent Critical Infrastructure

Critical infrastructures constitute the backbone of the world economies. The convergence of computer and communication technologies on common carriers (e.g. Internet) is creating a global world-wide infrastructure for the transmission and processing of information. Unfortunately, this contributes to couple the different infrastructures, and so to increase the risk related to the vulnerability of this system of systems because any failure of one of them may significantly affected the operation of the other ones. In this paper, we propose a viable modelling approach that can help to study faults propagation across heterogeneous infrastructures and it represents the basis for the realization of a simulator useful to evaluate potential consequences of accidental or deliberate failures.