Gerard P. O'Reilly

Critical national infrastructure reliability modeling and analysis

One of the top 10 priorities of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is protection of our critical national infrastructures including power, communications, transportation, and water. This paper presents models to quantify the interdependencies of critical infrastructures in the U.S. and evaluate plans to compensate for vulnerabilities. Communications is a key infrastructure, central to all others, so that understanding and modeling the risk due to communications disruptions is a high priority in order to enhance public safety and infrastructure resiliency. This paper discusses reliability modeling and analysis at a higher level than usual. Reliability analysis typically deals at the component or sub-system level and talks about “mean time to failure” and “mean time to repair” to derive availability estimates of equipment. Here, we deal with aggregate scales of failures, restoration, and mitigation across national infrastructures. This aggregate scale is useful when examining multiple infrastructures simultaneously with their interdependencies. System dynamics simulation models have been created for both communication networks and for the infrastructure interaction models that quantify these interactions using a risk-informed decision process for the evaluation of alternate protective measures and investment strategies in support of critical infrastructure protection. We will describe an example development of these coupled infrastructure consequence models and their application to the analysis of a power disruption and its cascading effect on the telecommunications infrastructure as well as the emergency services infrastructure. The results show significant impacts across infrastructures that can become increasingly exacerbated if the consumer population moves more and more to telecom services without power lifeline.

Inter-infrastructure modeling — Ports and telecommunications

During the past year, Bell Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratories have been modeling and simulating cross-industry interactions between infrastructures and the cascading of impacts under disruption scenarios. Critical national infrastructures for importing and exporting goods and materials (e.g., seaboard shipping through ports on the U.S. East and West Coasts) require the support of other industries to conduct business. For example, ports rely on the grid of information networks (voice, data, Internet) to communicate; they also rely on the power grid to operate machinery and the transportation grid to distribute the goods and materials. While information networks, power networks, and transportation networks tend to be highly reliable, disruptions can lead to extended outages requiring days/weeks to repair. These outages can cause shutdown of port operations, resulting in severe financial losses for the economy. This paper describes just one of those inter-infrastructure dependencies: by simulating a port and the interactions with the telecommunications infrastructure, it describes the impacts on both the flow of goods and materials through ports and the economic impact on the ports under a telecommunications disruption scenario.

Infrastructure simulations of disaster scenarios

Critical national infrastructures for transportation, power, finance, and other basic industries rely heavily on information and telecommunications networks (voice, data, Internet) to provide services and conduct business. While these networks tend to be highly reliable, disasters may lead to extended outages requiring days/weeks to repair. These outages cause loss of business continuity, and financial transaction failures. This work describes a simulation model of communications network disasters, their network performance, and their impact on other critical infrastructures using shipping through a port as an example.

Inter-infrastructure simulations across telecom, power, and emergency services

Critical national infrastructures for power, emergency services, finance, and other basic industries rely heavily on information and telecommunications networks (voice, data, Internet) to provide services and conduct business. While these networks tend to be highly reliable, outages do occur which can have cascading effects to other infrastructures. This paper describes a dynamic simulation model of a power outage which cascades to impact telecom for services without power back-up, which cascades to impact emergency services 911 calling, which causes increased severity of injuries.

Dynamic Changes in Subscriber Behavior and Their Impact on the Telecom Network in Cases of Emergency

The telecommunication network is recognized by the federal government as one of the critical national infrastructures that must be maintained and protected against debilitating attacks. We have previously shown how failures in the telecommunication network can quickly lead to telecommunication congestion and to extended delays in successful call completion. However, even if the telecom network remains fully operational, the special telecommunication demands that materialize at times of emergencies, and dynamically change based on subscriber behavior, can also adversely affect the performance of the overall telecommunication network. The network simulation modeling and analysis research tool (N-SMART) has been developed by Bell Labs as part of its work with the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center. This center is a joint program at Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, funded and managed by the Department of Homeland Securitys (DHS) Preparedness Directorate. N-SMART is a discrete event (call level) telecom model that simulates capacities, blocking levels, retrials, and time to complete calls for both wireline and wireless networks. N-SMART supports the capability of simulating subscriber reattempt behaviour under various scenarios. Using this capability we show how the network can be adversely impacted by sudden changes in subscriber behavior. We also explore potential solutions and ways of mitigating those impacts

A dynamic simulation approach to business continuity of wireline and wireless networks with cross-industry infrastructures

Critical national infrastructures for transportation, power, finance, and other basic industries rely heavily on information and telecommunications networks (voice, data, Internet) to provide services and conduct business. While these networks tend to be highly reliable, disasters may lead to extended outages requiring days/weeks to repair. These outages cause loss of business continuity and financial transaction failures. This paper describes a dynamic simulation model of communications network disasters, their network performance, and their impact on other critical infrastructures.

Network Capacity Analysis using Dynamic Simulation

Network capacity planning and analysis is usually done in a static way, point to point, with an optimal network design developed by dimensioning nodes and links to handle end-to-end network traffic demands. There is little consideration for disaster event planning except for some redundancy built into the network design. We propose doing network capacity planning using a dynamic simulation network approach to account for the usual traffic network capacity and resilient network capacity simultaneously which handles both normal situations and disaster situations. This dynamic simulation approach is across aggregated wireline and wireless networks since critical networks require high reliability and resiliency against disruptions (both natural disasters-hurricanes and man-made disruptions - terrorist acts). This approach can be used to study the convergence of wireline and wireless networks and their joint capacity needs

Power, telecommunications, and emergency services in a converged network world

Critical national infrastructures for power, emergency services, finance, and other basic industries rely heavily on information and telecommunications networks (voice, data, Internet) to provide services and conduct business. While todaypsilas legacy networks tend to be highly reliable, tomorrowpsilas converged networks may be less reliable and outages can have cascading effects to other infrastructures. This paper describes a dynamic simulation model of power outages on converged networks which cascades to impact telecommunication for services with limited power back-up, which cascades to impact emergency services (911 or 112 calling).