ISSUES ON CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES

In the last decades, the interactions between the infrastructures of a country gained increasing importance and consequently people started to acquire consciousness of their mutual interdependencies. This situation became evident in the last years when a number of large blackouts occurred in U.S.A. and in Europe and portions of electric power systems collapsed and forced other infrastructures to collapse as a consequence.

The paper reports a brief description of critical infrastructures, recalling some properties as safety, security, emergency, vulnerability and stability. Then, the implications of these characteristics in control actions are briefly evaluated. The need to build a reference model useful to analyze and to simulate the phenomena connected with critical infrastructures is discussed.

Investigating these concepts as emergence of properties may be a chance; this point of view may be useful to identify and to evaluate a systemic approach to deal with critical infrastructures problems. Some remarks about the complexity of the problems involved in managing the interaction between critical infrastructures are finally reported.