A logical high-level framework for Critical Infrastructure resilience and risk assessment

Critical Infrastructures (CIs) play crucial roles in modern societies and our reliance on their proper functioning even in the face of accidental failures and deliberate targeted attacks makes their protection of paramount importance. A notable characteristic of CIs is their interdependencies that may exist at many levels and facets of the infrastructure, and which may sometimes lead to unforeseen and unexpected interactions. In particular, the underlying dependencies may induce domino effects in the propagation of failure impacts with devastating consequences and pose serious threats. Thus, technologies that provide new insights and visibility into the infrastructure dependencies, helping stakeholders to understand root causes and to predict the propagation of failure impacts are valuable for the assessment of risks and the engineering of resilience into the infrastructure. This paper presents a logical framework for the high-level modelling of CI dependencies along with analytical tools for automated reasoning about resilience properties of CIs.