An ontological approach to simulate critical infrastructures

This paper presents a Knowledge Base System (KBS) as a key component of a federated simulation framework aimed at investigating the dependencies among Critical Infrastructures (CIs). The KBS, based on the ontological formalism, represents the properties and the relations of each simulation domain and the dependency relations among different domains. Some auxiliary data structures, necessary to model the interaction among the simulators of different CIs, have been defined and have been populated through suitable queries to the KBS. The adoption of the ontological formalism allowed the definition of a common formalism to deal with the heterogeneity arising from the presence of different domains.