Modeling Center Helps Planners Avoid Disaster

Signal, Feb 2008 by Kenyon, Henry S

National facility simulates economic impact of disruptions to business, communications and financial networks.

Defending the critical infrastructure of the United States is a difficult and complex job. Federal agencies are tasked with determining the security of a variety of interconnected systems, which can affect entire regions-or the whole nationin a catastrophic cascade of failures in the event of a major disaster or terrorist attack.

One organization responsible for modeling and simulating the impact of potential threats to the nation's vital telecommunications, fuel, transport and financial framework is the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. NISAC is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS's) Office of Infrastructure Protection and is jointly operated by the Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. The center prepares and shares analyses of critical infrastructure and key resources, outlining their interdependencies, vulnerabilities and consequences of disruption.

NISAC originated in the late 1990s when concern grew over the potential effects on computer networks and infrastructure caused by year 2000 computer coding flaws. A 1998 presidential directive outlined the importance of the nation's critical infrastructures and the need to study how they were interrelated. This type of analysis had never been done before, says Lillian Snyder, a manager at NISAC's Critical Infrastructure and Economic Analysis Department. The directive outlined seven major areas for study: telecommunications, water, transportation, electric power, oil and gas, banking and finance, and government services.

By the late 1990s, officials realized that with increased computerization, all of the seven infrastructure areas were becoming interdependent. Snyder notes that Sandia approached each of these industries and explained that infrastructure protection was now a major national issue. But at the time, the industries maintained that no business case existed for studying how they affected or interrelated with other infrastructures-they were only interested in their own vertical bottom lines. "We saw that as a national laboratory issue because we felt that the interdependencies between them [infrastructures] were growing greater. Automated teller machines didn't work without electric power. Electric power didn't work without gas. Gas didn't work without transportation. The whole area was becoming really intertwined, mainly because of the advance of computerization and the growing interest in the Internet," Snyder says.

Sandia and Los Alamos began looking across their facilities at the modeling work they had conducted over the last 15 to 20 years and examined how they could leverage these capabilities efforts into a useful program. This work also included knowledge management efforts designed to gather and analyze large amounts of data quickly. Snyder explains that MSAC grew out of this effort, as did other initiatives studying infrastructure interdependencies for the Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Defense Department. The program originally was funded by the Defense Department, but after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, funding shifted to the DOE before finally coming under the authority of the DHS in 2003.

Since its inception, MSAC has worked closely with the DOE because electric power, gas and oil infrastructures fall under the department's mandate. Snyder notes that the DOE wanted to understand how its power-related infrastructures supported other areas such as telecommunications, banking and finance. She credits the DOE with being ahead of its time regarding the mapping of its relationship with other industries and infrastructures. "We realized that it was such an interdependent problem that you really needed to look at it from a systems view. Sandia specializes in systems analysis. DHS gave us the ability, for the first time, to look across all of these areas," she says.

Because Sandia had been conducting infrastructure analysis before NISAC's founding, it had used its own funds to develop several early modeling and simulation efforts that became a key part of the program. One study examined how the removal of assets in a particular infrastructure could cascade into other areas. This effort became the Fast Analysis Infrastructure Tool (FAIT), which is designed to synthesize infrastructure data and expert knowledge on infrastructure operations and interactions. The tool allows analysts to define relationships between assets across different infrastructures. These interdependencies are factored by characteristics such as proximity, known service boundaries and ownership. FAIT allows users to search other data sources, both within NISAC and across the Internet, to provide a more complete understanding of a particular asset.

FAIT also estimates the economic consequences of disrupting an asset. The tool's regional economic analyst enters data from the affected area and couples them with other NISAC modeling results, such as estimates for the disruption's duration and magnitude, to create a regional economic analysis. This regional picture provides analysts with an understanding of the direct and indirect economic consequences for each sector of the economy in every county in the analysis area.