Social network analysis of the vulnerabilities of interdependent critical infrastructures

Abstract

Interdependency among critical infrastructures contributes to vulnerabilities of those infrastructures. In this paper, the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructures are identified and analysed using social network analysis. In the analysis of network centrality, the importance of each critical infrastructure, in terms of its contribution to infrastructure interdependency, is ranked. The findings show that electricity and telecommunication are the two most important critical infrastructures that contribute to infrastructure interdependency, which further render the infrastructure network vulnerable to cascading damage. An example system is given to illustrate the ideas and results presented in this paper.