An Effective Approach for Cascading Effects Prevision in Critical Infrastructures

The recent dramatic experiences caused by natural or man-made disasters make mandatory to understand and manage the mutual dependency of those infrastructures that, if disrupted or destroyed, would seriously compromise our quality of life. Although many models have been developed to study particular contexts and single infrastructure sectors, a global strategy to represent and manage the complex issue of infrastructure dependency has not been deployed yet. This paper presents an heuristic approach that can be applied, on several different scales, to select Critical Infrastructures and to model dependencies, thus paving the way for cascading effects prevention and governance.