Graph-based Cascading Impact Estimation for Identifying Crucial Infrastructure Components

Critical Infrastructures (CIs) such as energy, communication, and transportation compose a complex network that sustains day-to-day commodity flows vital to national security, economic stability, and public safety. Failures caused by an extreme weather event or a man-made incident can trigger widespread cascading failures, sending ripple effects at regional or even national scales. To minimize such impact, emergency responders must identify crucial components within CIs during such stressor events in a systematic and quantifiable manner and take appropriate mitigating actions. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed a graph-based analytic system named URBAN-NET, which estimates cascading impact caused by the disruption of critical infrastructure components by leveraging the topology of a critical infrastructure network. Before and during critical events (e.g., hurricanes), the URBAN-NET system generates reports that contain the ranking of the most crucial energy components that have the most downstream impact across infrastructure layers. The developed system has been integrated with the Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information (EAGLE-I™) system, which is a situational-awareness system operated by ORNL for the department of energy of the United States.