The Need to Improve Local Self-Awareness in CIP/CIIP

Interdependencies represent one of the most relevant elements in the actual techno-social scenario. Indeed, especially due to the wide spread of ICT, we observe an exponential increase in the points of contact among the different infrastructures. This phenomenon is largely due to (or induced by) the increased need to exchange information among large communities of users and stakeholders in order to improve efficiency, to reduce costs and to supply innovative services. Unfortunately, these interdependencies have dramatically increased the level of complexity and introduced, as emphasised by some recent episodes, new and very dangerous vulnerabilities. The need to improve robustness and resilience of the system of systems composed by the different interdependent infrastructures represents a very hard challenge for the next years. In the paper we emphasize that, from the technological point of view, strategies to reach this goal should be based on a better use of information. Indeed in the presence of global threats, we need to improve the local capability to autonomously react to anomaly situations. This capability is largely related, further to an amount of distributed intelligence, to our ability to improve information gathering (from environment) and sharing (among infrastructures). However, as stressed in the paper, technology is just one dimension along which we have to work; indeed, we should consider also social, economical and political activity: Critical Infrastructure Protection is a global task, it calls for global solution!