Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies Assessment

Throughout the world there is strong recognition that critical infrastructure security and resilience needs to be improved. In the United States, the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) provides the strategic vision to guide the national effort to manage risk to the Nation’s critical infrastructure.” The achievement of this vision is challenged by the complexity of critical infrastructure systems and their inherent interdependencies.

The update to the NIPP presents an opportunity to advance the nation’s efforts to further understand and analyze interdependencies. Such an important undertaking requires the involvement of public and private sector stakeholders and the reinforcement of existing partnerships and collaborations within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other Federal agencies, including national laboratories; State, local, tribal, and territorial governments; and nongovernmental organizations.

Characterizing Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies
Critical infrastructure interdependencies constitute a risk multiplier: they can themselves be a threat or hazard, affect the resilience and protection performance of critical infrastructure, and lead to cascading and escalating failures. Interdependencies influence all components of risk.

Assessing critical infrastructure interdependencies requires the consideration of complex and multidimensional elements.

The term “Type of Dependency” classifies the existing interactions between infrastructures. “Operating Environment” characterizes elements that could affect the different types of interdependencies. “Coupling and Response Behavior” illustrates how a critical infrastructure could respond to a disruption related to a dependency. “Type of Failure” addresses the degradation that could result from existing interactions between infrastructures. Finally, a risk assessment that integrates interdependency considerations must account for the specific “Infrastructure Characteristics” of each infrastructure and for each one’s “State of Operation” when an incident occurs (e.g., degradation of infrastructure interconnections). A complete understanding of interdependencies should incorporate multiple aspects of this multi-dimensional space.

A Systems Approach to Interdependency Analysis
Infrastructure interdependency analysis can be analytically complicated, time consuming, and costly, which in turn can limit the ability of stakeholders to understand and use this information to make risk-informed decisions that enhance resilience. In order to manage these complexities, the infrastructure community should use a process that helps partners prioritize resilience assessment efforts through a “systems approach” to regional interdependency analysis.

This approach is based on the assumption that a critical asset or facility can be considered as part of a broader system of infrastructure. Higher-level constructs (e.g., a community or a region) include multiple systems. As such, a community or a region operates as a “system of systems.” Viewed within this framework, high-level systems analysis—using proven and scientifically sound tools—can help identify the most critical lower-level systems. This information can in turn help determine where to conduct more detailed site assessments on only the most critical asset-level components.

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