Exploring impacts of single failure propagation between SCADA and SUC

Critical infrastructures (CI) deserve increased attention as our societies simply rely on most of their goods and services they are expected to continuously supply. The study of the interdependencies within and among CI is an emerging research field since modern CI are becoming increasingly vital as well as automated and interlinked in complex ways to maintain their daily operations. A failure within any CI or even loss of its continuous service may be damaging enough to society and economy while cascading failures across boundaries have the potential for multi-infrastructural collapse with unprecedented negative consequences. In this paper, the interdependencies between Industrial Control Systems (ICS), in particular SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), and the underlying System Under Control (SUC) are explored and studied using advanced model/simulation techniques. A single failure propagation experiment that analyzes a typical substation of the Electricity Power Supply System (EPSS), comprising components from both SUC and SCADA is developed to visualize the propagation of cascading events across boundaries and evaluate negative impacts on the service availability of the system due to interdependencies related problems.