Dependencies analysis in emergency scenarios

Recently, the “All Hazard” paradigm gained a large interest in the framework of Critical Infrastructure Protection, stressing the importance to guarantee an adequate level of service continuity in spite of any type of negative events, ranging from natural disasters to technological faults, considering both accidental and malicious actions. However, such an approach makes more difficult the analysis of the scenario, because experts have to consider a multitude of possible causes and their possible effects. Moreover, there is the need to consider, further to the direct consequences, also those induced by second or higher-level effects, i.e. the consequences induced by dependencies on other systems and cascading effects on the population. To help experts in this hard task, within the EC co-funded project Threvi2, the authors developed an approach to manage the cause-effect relationships using a taxonomic framework, where the different causes are decomposed in their elementary effects, and then grouped into classes of threats.