Identifying Vulnerable Critical Infrastructure Zones in Smart Cities

Abstract

Emerging smart cities are leveraging technologies to create smart critical infrastructures with the goal of improving the quality of life. These smart infrastructures introduce new vulnerabilities to the failure of ICT and electric power. Hence there is a need for holistic analysis of critical infrastructures incorporating power and communications with other infrastructures when determining weak points. Here we propose a framework for identifying the most important geographical zones within a city from a critical infrastructure viewpoint. The framework combines multiple metrics including societal, geographic and network science based, as well as including power requirements. Furthermore it enables analyst to study both networked critical infrastructure and standalone critical infrastructure. A case study of four critical infrastructures in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is given illustrating the approach. The results show that considering the infrastructures as a group in a holistic fashion yields much different results when compared with studying each infrastructure individually. Further, we demonstrate how the results of the holistic analysis can be incorporated into a risk analysis.