Susceptibility analysis of complex infrastructure targets

Abstract

Previously, the authors explored the use of hybrid functional models to find failure modes of simple infrastructure models. Pulsed excitation was shown to be effective in causing failures in simple oscillators and related simple models, using the energy of the circuit to bring about the failure. A simple SCADA system was used as a practical example of these failure models in infrastructure systems. In this paper, we extend this technique to clusters of SCADAs (as might be used in real systems). The first demonstration shows that unwanted excitation of odd functional resonance modes can cause failure of one of these clusters. Finally, functional failures in complex interconnects between the SCADA units can cause system failure.