I®ML: An Infrastructure Resilience-Oriented Modeling Language

Critical infrastructure (CI) modeling and analysis is a very challenging research topic. One of the most pressing issues is to find an effective representation for addressing the system vulnerabilities caused by interdependencies, which, if exploited, could result in nontrivial accident scenarios. Until now, this question has been tackled for different sector-specific infrastructures (electricity grid, telecommunications networks, supply chains, etc.), and very few generalizable analysis tools have been developed. However, all CI share some features that can be leveraged in order to build a common modeling framework. This paper identifies these common features, which it exploits to develop a modeling language: the infrastructure resilience-oriented modeling language (I (R) ML). I (R) ML is designed to facilitate the analysis of operational interdependencies among the infrastructure components and overall resilience, i.e., the ability of the infrastructure to withstand and recover under off-nominal (anomalous) conditions. A number of examples are used to illustrate the modeling concepts and highlight the analytical capability of I (R) ML.