Analyzing Cascading Effects in Interdependent Critical Infrastructures

International audience; Critical Infrastructures (CIs) are resources that are essential for the performance of society, including its economy and its security. Large-scale disasters, whether natural or man-made, can have devastating primary (direct) effects on some CI and significant indirect effects (cascading effects) on other CIs, because CIs are interconnected and depend on each other’s services. Recent work by Laugé et al. expressed the dependency values among CIs as dependency matrices for various durations of the primary CI failure. For better preparedness and mitigation of CI failures knowledge of the weak points in CI interdependencies is crucial. To this effect, we have developed …