Modelling Approaches

Understanding and mitigating risks and threats to critical infrastructures relies heavily on the ability to construct and validate models often involving physical systems or even human intervention. This, together with the wide range of scales from critical systems such as industrial process control systems of critical facilities to interactions among multiple sectors up to and including a global scale presents a very large problem space which can only be conquered by an equally broad range of modelling techniques commensurate to the infrastructure aspects being studied. Sophisticated domain-specific models do not necessarily provide the type of insight into dependencies and interactions, which are often driven by information and communication systems and necessitate the study of novel models. Similarly, however, conventional information security research is typically not concerned with interactions of information systems with physical environment, while at the same time conventional infrastructure models emphasise on well-understood statistical event models rather than considering adversarial behaviour.