Risk Assessment in Complex Interacting Infrastructure Systems

Critical infrastructures have some of the characteristic properties of complex systems. They exhibit infrequent large failures events. These events, though infrequent, often obey a power law distribution in their probability versus size. This power law behavior suggests that ordinary risk analysis might not apply to these systems. It is thought that some of this behavior comes from different parts of the systems interacting with each other both in space and time. While these complex infrastructure systems can exhibit these characteristics on their own, in reality these individual infrastructure systems interact with each other in even more complex ways. This interaction can lead to increased or decreased risk of failure in the individual systems. To investigate this and to formulate appropriate risk assessment tools for such systems, a set of models are used to study to impact of coupling complex systems. A probabilistic model and a dynamical model that have been used to study blackou...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: HICSS
• Authors: David E. Newman, Bertrand Nkei, Benjamin A. Carreras, Ian Dobson, Vickie E. Lynch, Paul Gradney
• Keywords: Biometrics, Complex Infrastructure Systems, Complex Systems, HICSS 2005, Power Law, System Sciences