| Critical infrastructure systems are the physical assets that provide modern societies with the fundamental resources required to conduct essential economic and social operations, from power and electricity to drinking water and telecommunications. The crucial importance of these vast, complex and ubiquitous infrastructures is widely acknowledged and as such, the necessity to protect these networks from destructive events---both intentional and accidental---has garnered the attention of researchers and security experts alike. Similarly, it is also well recognized that the cost and effort associated with total protection presents an enormous challenge. Society will achieve its greatest return on investment by correctly identifying, prioritizing and protecting the most vulnerable assets in its infrastructure portfolio. This implies the need for a screening methodology by which we can target the most crucial assets, and effective metrics with which to gauge the vulnerability of a given network as a whole, allowing us to assess risk levels and evaluate proposed or completed engineering changes. The following work studies the robustness of critical infrastructure systems using a consequence-based framework, assessing the functionality of networks conditional on some destructive event having taken place. In order to do so, empirical applications of two different approaches---the network theory-based methodology and a novel entropy-based methodology---were carried out on the electrical transmission networks of the four largest Canadian provinces, using information available in the public domain.;Our attempt to investigate the similarities between the separate methodologies failed to provide any meaningful consistencies when comparing provinces' robustness according to the different grading schemes, but did provide promising avenues for future research. |
