Modelling and real-time analysis of critical infrastructure using discrete event systems on graphs

Critical infrastructure (CI) systems form an interdependent network where failures in one system may quickly affect the state of other linked systems. Real-time modelling and analysis of CI systems gives valuable time-critical insight on the situational status during incidents and standard operation. Obtaining real-time quantitative measurements about the state of CI systems is necessary for situational awareness (SA) purposes. In this paper we present a general framework for real-time critical infrastructure modelling and analysis using discrete event systems (DES) on graphs. Our model augments standard graph-theoretic analysis with elements from automata theory to achieve model which captures interdependencies in CI. The framework was tested on various graphs with differing sizes and degree distributions. The resulting framework was implemented, and benchmarks indicate that it is suitable for real-time SA analysis.