Critical infrastructure modeling: An approach to characterizing interdependencies of complex networks & control systems

Critical infrastructure control systems face many challenges entering the 21st century, including natural disasters, cyber attacks, and terrorist attacks. Revolutionary change is underway to solve many existing issues, including gaining greater situational awareness and resiliency through embedding modeling and advanced control algorithms in smart sensors and control devices instead of in a central controller. To support design, testing, and component analysis, a flexible simulation and modeling capability is needed. Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory are developing and evaluating such a capability through their CIPRsim modeling and simulation framework.