Simulation of Cascading Outages in (Inter)-Dependent Services and Estimate of Their Societal Consequences

Abstract

We present RecSIM, a specific application which is part of the CIPCast tool, a Decision Support System (DSS) for risk analysis of (inter)-dependent Critical Infrastructures (CI) under development within the EU FP7 CIPRNet Project. Electrical and the telecommunication networks play a central role in systems of CI and are also strongly inter-dependent: the latter allows tele-control operations on the former which, in turn, supplies energy to the latter. Services outages of those CI can generate cascading effects also on other systems, thus producing large societal consequences. The RecSIM tool is a discrete-time simulator able to model the dependencies between the electric and the telecommunication systems, to simulate the cascading effects in the two networks and to reproduce the results of the actions taken by operators to reconfigure the electrical network. Starting from the prediction of damages on the network topology, RecSIM reproduces the whole crisis and estimates the resulting outages (outage start and outage end) in all the involved CI elements. RecSIM, moreover, through the Consequence Analysis module, estimates the effects of the degradation (or the complete loss) of the electric and the telecommunication services, via the estimate of specific indices useful to assess the severity of the crisis in terms of its societal impact.