Identification of Sources of Failures and Their Propagation in Critical Infrastructures from 12 Years of Public Failure Reports

Survival in our society relies on continued services from interdependent critical infrastructures. CITI failures are particularly pervasive in their penetration of all infrastructures and can have a very large impact in the workings of this fabric of society. In this research, we have explored a less studied proposition of using public domain data to understand CITI and other critical infrastructures interdependencies. Using this approach we have studied public domain infrastructure failure report for considerable span of time (12 years). To our knowledge, this is the first attempt of this type of analysis in this area (using either public or privately owned data sources). This paper also discusses the difficulties and limitations of using public domain data in an academic research.. We have developed a CITI failure database that will be very useful for our Infrastructures Interdependencies Coordination (I2C) research group at UBC to set up realistic test case scenarios involving CITI failures during large-scale system failure situations involving multiple infrastructure interdependencies. This work was done as part of the effort by the I2C group (Infrastructure Interdependencies Coordination group) of the University of British Columbia to better understand, model, and simulate infrastructure interdependencies during large disaster situations.