This White Paper outlines a pathway towards the integration of the European Resilience Management Guidelines (ERMG) developed as part of the work performed by five Horizon 2020 DRS-07-2014 Projects. Resilience management addresses essential capabilities for Critical Infrastructure (CI) to adapt to an uncertain future and changing environment. Targeted at policy makers, it provides an overview of essential resilience concepts, methods and techniques to attain results from these Projects and to work towards an integrated guideline which could be implemented EU wide. It presents various identified issues and opportunities surrounding a potential integration process including: resilience concepts and understanding; terminology and standardisation issues; the core challenges in reaching full integration; complementarities as well as possible incompatibilities among the processes, methods, tools and interventions, and where future research would be beneficial towards adoption of resilience management. It presents some practical examples from the Project pilots and demonstrations of how these guidelines may be adapted and adopted by numerous target users to a variety of CIs and other domains.

The understanding of the interdependencies among the Critical Infrastructures (CI) is an issue of profound importance, since such a knowledge is fundamental for acquiring a thorough and reliable view of the impact of each hazard, taking into account also the possible cascade on neighbouring CIs. Nevertheless, the exhaustive investigation of the interdependencies within the multi-dimensional space of the operation of the modern systems requires a wide range of information that is difficult or even impossible to be made available since it regards highly dynamic variables with no consistent physical modelling, including also semantic notions.

In this respect, the present report introduces a framework that aims at providing an holistic view of the aggregate system of cooperating Critical Infrastructures by exploiting simple notions of the everyday experience for creating a consistent ontology-based representation of the system through standardised criteria.

In this report we will go through the importance of developing the necessary data models for representing critical infrastructures using GIS technologies that aim at reaching a major objective: improve the collaboration between actors in the domain of critical infrastructures at local, regional, national and international level in order to achieve higher resilience of critical infrastructures and as a consequence contribute towards higher societal resilience, an issue that attracts an increasing interest. 

This report is not providing a detailed data model description for the representation of critical infrastructures. That would require consensus among the stakeholders, which is not possible since there is no structure in place to work on this topic. Instead we provide all the arguments for this necessity as well as some high level technical requirements.

In this report we aim to provide a feasibility study and describe the main elements for developing stress tests in the domain of critical infrastructures. Stress tests can be a very useful element for the assessment of the resilience of critical infrastructures against a number of hazards. Currently stress tests are developed in the domain of Nuclear and Financial sector in order to assess the safety, security and resilience of these systems. Taking stock of the activities in these sectors we aim to provide a feasibility analysis and sketch the main lines for the development of stress tests for other infrastructures, systems and sectors.

In the present report we are proposing a dynamic model for interdependencies assessment with the capacity to be applied in different geographical scales, from regional to continental. In order to achieve this we have based our work on an existing model, built ad-hoc for a specific European region and we have rendered it into a modular model that can be applied also elsewhere. The semantics of the original model have been preserved, however, it has been able to produce autonomous building blocks (nodes) that can be interconnected in order to assess the interdependencies of complex networks of infrastructures. 

The model has been built in Simulink and it has shown its capacity to be applied in large interdependent infrastructures of several hundred nodes. This model will be included in the GRRASP, in order to be able to provide to the CIP community a stand-alone tool for assessing interdependencies.