Identifying and Evaluating Critical Infrastructures - A Goal-driven Dependability Analysis Framework

Organizations increasingly depend on the correct functioning (dependability) of technological infrastructures (critical infrastructures) that are generally out of their control: banking and financial services, electricity, fuel and water supply networks, and information and telecommunication networks. Being able of clearly identifying the specific elements of these infrastructures upon which they strictly depend, and understanding the impact of any possible failure in business terms (at strategic and financial level), is crucial for organizations to identify, and prioritise the investments to reduce their vulnerability (dependability investments). To address this issue, the paper proposes a goal-driven dependability analysis framework, which combines high-level requirements engineering techniques for socio-technical systems with a fuzzy logic simulator. An on-going e-government project is used for illustration.