| Critical infrastructures, such as telecommunications, energy, banking and finance, transportation, water systems and emergency services are the foundations of modem society. There is a heavy dependence on critical infrastructures at multiple levels within the supply chain of any good or service. Any disruptions in the supply chain may cause profound cascading effect to other critical infrastructures. A 1997 report by the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection states that a serious interruption in freight rail service would bring the coal mining industry to a halt within approximately two weeks and the availability of electric power could be reduced in a matter of one to two months.;Therefore, this research aimed at representing and assessing the interdependencies between coal supply, transportation and energy production. A proposed geospatial decision support framework was established and applied to analyze interdependency related disruption impact. By utilizing the data warehousing approach, geospatial and non-geospatial data were retrieved, integrated and analyzed based on the transportation model and geospatial disruption analysis developed in the research. The results showed that by utilizing this framework, disruption impacts can be estimated at various levels (e.g., power plant, county, state, etc.) for preventative or emergency response efforts. The information derived from the framework can be used for data mining analysis (e.g., assessing transportation mode usages; finding alternative coal suppliers, etc.). |
