Analyzing And Simulating Interdependencies In Critical Infrastructure Systems

Critical infrastructures can be defined as industries, institutions, distribution networks that provide a continual flow of goods and services essential to country’s defense and economic security and to the health, welfare, and safety of its citizens. Five major sectors can in general be considered critical:vital human services, information and telecommunication, energy, banking and finance, and physical distribution. They play a crucial role in the social life, once they are damaged, there will be a direct threat to public health, stability of economic and the damage may even lead to the collapse of the entire social system.With the development of society, the application of information technology, critical infrastructure systems are much more efficient, on the other hand they are much more dependent on each other, and the cascading effects are increasingly prominent. Researchers all over the world are paying more and more attention to the critical infrastructure systems. So this paper focuses the study on the interdependencies among infrastructures, simulation and optimization of the interdependent infrastructures using software. And the purpose is to take effective measures in case of emergency to reduce the loss to infrastructures because of the interdependencies between them. The main contents are shown as follows:(1) Quantitatively determine the degree of interdependency and analyze the vital node. Interdependency means a bidirectional relationship between two infrastructures through which the state of each infrastructure influences or is correlated to the state of the other. In this paper, the linkages of material and information are used to quantitatively determine the degree of interdependencies between infrastructures, and then analyze the vital nodes through the incidence matrix.(2) Agent-based modeling and simulation. The approach of Agent-based modeling is used in this article. As critical infrastructure system is a complex and highly interdependent and networked social-technical system, the method of Agent-based modeling which can easily reflect the autonomic and interdependent infrastructure is much better than the Object-Oriented Modeling. In addition, the complexity of critical infrastructure makes us hardly get the precise data and makes it difficult to model and optimize using traditional mathematical model, so we use the software Anylogic to simulate and optimize the critical infrastructures.