A Simulation-driven Tool for Supporting Risk and Resilience Assessment in Cities

In large cities and metropolitan areas, Critical Infrastructures (CIs) from different sectors are located in a geographically narrow space and represent the backbone of social life in that area. Due to their high interdependencies among each other, a single incident within one CI can have wide-ranging cascading effects among the entire CI network and thus affect society in that area to a large degree. Therefore, crisis managers in cities need a consistent overview on the potential consequences an incident might have to estimate the city’s resilience and coordinate necessary risk measures appropriately. In this paper, we present a tool-based approach, i.e., the ODYSSEUS approach, to support cities’ risk and crisis managers on evaluating the cascading effects of an incident happening in their metropolitan areas. The presented tool is set up with information of CIs from various sectors within the metropolitan area, focusing in particular on different concepts for dealing with diverse quality and sources of the available information such as integrating expert opinions or neural networks. Further, the ODYSSEUS approach utilizes an abstract model to represent the CIs’ assets and their interrelations; the simulation capabilities of the ODSSEUS approach are based on that model and provide a detailed overview on the propagation of cascading effects in the CI network. To showcase the functionality of the ODYSSEUS approach, we will present the evaluation of a use case scenario, describe the instantiation process of the abstract CI model, demonstrate how resulting cascading effects are simulated and how the results can be used to support crisis managers to evaluate counter measures.