CAREER: Network Theory of Critical Interdependent Infrastructures

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will establish an integrated research and education program devoted to the study of critical infrastructures from the perspective of network theory. Physical networks - transportation, water, food supply, communications and power generation and transmission - and transactional/relational infrastructures - financial and trade networks - represent fundamental assets for society and the economy, serving as the backbone for the flow of information, people and goods. A complex mesh of interdependencies among critical infrastructures is at the basis of their operational effectiveness. For example, the power grid depends on the communication network for control, and the communication network relies on the power grid for electricity supply. The presence of interdependencies also dramatically augments the vulnerability of infrastructures by boosting the potential for cascading failures due to the amplification of small-scale initial failures or targeted attacks to catastrophic proportions, and substantially delaying restoration after collapse. Although the urgency of these issues has been stressed since 1996 by the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, recent infrastructure collapses that have followed extreme events such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters highlight a growing risk of catastrophic failures. This project will develop a new generation of analytic and computational methods to better understand the role of interdependencies among critical infrastructures in their security, stability, robustness and resilience. The study of critical interdependent infrastructures has a relatively long tradition in engineering research. Typical approaches involve agent-based simulations, economic theoretical analyses, system dynamical equations, and reliability theory. This project contributes to the advancement of this field by studying interdependencies among critical infrastructures using tools and methods from statistical physics of complex networks. This is a potentially transformative approach, so far attempted only in theoretical studies of coupled random network structures, but not in the analysis of real-world critical infrastructures. The research goal of this project is to develop a unifying network theory able to describe different types of critical interdependent infrastructures within a single modeling framework. The framework will allow the understanding of basic features of these systems, and how microscopic properties of their structure and dynamics lead to significant emergent phenomena at the global scale. The mathematical analysis enabled by the framework will provide ready-to-use formulas of intervention for fast recovery after catastrophic failures. These methods will be applied to critical interdependent infrastructure systems, such as energy production and distribution, waterways, pipelines, communication networks, and multimodal transportation networks, within the United States. A key educational goal of this CAREER award is to integrate novel undergraduate and graduate courses dedicated to the network theory of critical interdependent infrastructures into the Informatics and Engineering programs at Indiana University.