Mitigating the Vulnerability of Critical Infrastructures to Catastrophic Failures

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Workshop on Mitigating the Vulnerability of Critical Infrastructures to Catastrophic FailuresCritical infrastructures form the backbone of the economies of both the developed and the developing countries throughout the world. They include electric power networks, fuel networks, water networks, transportation networks, telecommunications networks, and computer networks to cite a few. Assessing and mitigating their vulnerability to catastrophic failures call for the development of a new body of knowledge that integrates in a unified manner and builds on concepts and methodologies pertaining to many engineering and scientific fields. Interdependencies between critical infrastructures were addressed by the OSTP/NSF workshop held in June 2001, which was entitled "Critical Infrastructures: Needs in Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Training." While this workshop highlighted the need of multi-disciplinary research work in critical infrastructure protection, major failures in electric power systems, telecommunications networks, and computer networks were not discussed and analyzed. This is the focus of the workshop that will be held at the Lyceum, in Alexandria, Virginia, on September 10-11, 2001, under the joint patronage of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the International Institute for Critical National Infrastructures (CRIS), the World Institute for Disaster Risk Management (DRM), and the International Institute for Information Technology (IIIT). This workshop will bring together about forty experts in critical infrastructures and disaster risk management from North America, Europe, and Asia. It will give them the opportunity to discuss various emerging concepts such as hidden failure, vulnerability, cascading failure, interdependency, risk assessment, and self-healing, among others, and identify research topics aimed at laying out the foundation of a new field of expertise dealing with the vulnerability of interdependent critical infrastructures. Key speakers will be invited to give presentations and to submit position papers. Proceedings will be issued in an electronic form and posted on several web sites that are popular among researchers and engineers of the critical infrastructure and disaster risk management communities.