The MIMESIS project: A decision support system for risk analysis and the impact evaluation of crisis scenarios of Critical Infrastructures deriving from extreme natural events

Extreme natural hazards are regarded as major threats for Critical Infrastructures (CI). A fault of single elements of a CI, due to CI interdependency, can produce hardly predictable cascading effects. Coupling meteorological-climatic and geophysical predictions with the knowledge of all CIs in a given region could be used to design a new class of Decision Support Systems (DSS) able to provide a dynamic risk assessment of the elements of all CIs and to estimate the impact that a specific crisis scenario could produce. We describe the MIMESIS tool, the prototype of such a new class of DSS, which includes tools for the prediction of crisis scenarios and for the evaluation of their impacts on a set of interdependent infrastructures, in terms of reduction of the delivered services and the impact that services unavailability might have on population. MIMESIS is currently under development and will constitute the kernel of a Center of Regional Services to de- liver alert and support for crises prediction, their management, and the design of new strategies to mitigate their effects.