Collaborative Modeling of Awareness in Critical Infrastructure Protection

While awareness is acknowledged as a key factor in crisis management, much is vague as to the meaning of the awareness concept, its measurement, how awareness impacts the lifecycle of a crisis and how awareness can be promoted. This vagueness, we hypothesize, potentially reflects the immaturity of crisis management theory. This in turn obscures the landscape of leading crisis indicators, which then leaves crucial clues for the development of crisis management approaches in the attention shadow. In the absence of codified knowledge, the collaborative approach known as Group Model Building employing system dynamics, where modeling experts elicit and unify fragmented, tacit knowledge from domain experts, is worth exploring. We have done so in the context a European project on crisis management of large-scale power cut crises. We describe our preliminary results and propose a concept model relating awareness, leading indicators, and policies for crisis prevention and mitigation.