Modeling impact of power outages on interdependent critical infrastructure

This paper presents a network modeling approach which covers a diverse set of different critical infrastructures and their mutual interdependencies. It aims at the understanding and quantification of the effects of severe disasters, e.g., large-scale, long-lasting power outages, in order to quantify the resilience of both the full grid as well as individual infrastructures. To this end, damage cascades based on various interdependencies are simulated, i.e., the temporal evolution of the system breakdown is evaluated. As an application, data from OpenStreetMap is used to construct an exemplary grid for the medium sized city of Freiburg, Germany for which the effects of a severe power outage are simulated.