Contents



Preface

Critical infrastructure (CI) provides, better than any other metaphor, the representation of a large "System of Systems" providing primary functions and vital services for societal life. They support citizens' activities and constitute a necessary component for all industrial and economical value chains. Their protection and the enhancement of systemic resilience must be thus a primary concern of modern countries. CI, together with technological functions and essential services, carries on a strong social value as it transports psychological side images related to the perception of public security, social cohesion, and technological efficiency, in a way that the safeguard and optimal management are elemental in contributing to the citizens' trust in public

Such multiple relevances are, however, accompanied by a number of issues that make CI management and protection difficult, leaving them prone to their intrinsic and extrinsic vulnerabilities of natural and anthropic events that continuously threaten their integrity; for example, voluntary attacks to the physical and the cyber scale are threats. This further increases their complexity leading to the need for identifying new strategies to overcome limitations and achieve their "smart

The major issues enhancing complexity and vulnerability in the CI domain are related on the one hand to their mutual interdependencies and, on the other hand, to the current *linearization* of their management. Dependencies and inter-dependencies are due to the intense exchange of services among CI with the consequent emergence of dangerous perturbations that can propagate from one system to other connected systems. Perturbations might expand instabilities, reduce functionality in time and space, and consequently transform a local impact into consequences that might

Management *linearization* results from the current ownership fragmentation of CI: different operators own and manage their CI independently from the others (even from those that provide services to them) as if the bundle of CI was only weakly interacting. Only in this case would *linearized* management be effective; however, this is not the case and the strong coupling between CI operators makes the *linearized* management strategy much less effective and unable to produce optimal results,

particularly in the case of strong perturbations occurring in extended crises.

In order to overcome the negative effects produced by these issues, technology must provide new tools and new ideas for smarter management of CI that, although accounting for the unavoidable constraints (i.e., ownership fragmentation, industrial competitions among players insisting on the same CI, etc.), can improve the current management efficacy and enhance the resilience at the "systemic" scale. Resilience, by far, is the more important endpoint of all efforts: after having abandoned the unrealistic claim of enduring complete invulnerability to the assets, resilience offers a smart, adaptive property that allows a system to regain its equilibrium configuration, rapidly and effectively, after a reduction (or even the loss of it)

extend on larger scales and last for longer periods of time.

institutions.

management."

due to some perturbations.
