Case study on critical infrastructures: assessment of electric power systems

Critical Infrastructures (CI) are increasingly responsible for vital services our society relies on; therefore, assessing their resilience is of utmost importance for improving trustworthiness on their services. Given the many challenges and open issues involved, a number of initiatives have been ongoing in the last decade, researching methods and developing tools for resilience assessment of critical infrastructures. Moving from the major challenges posed by CI from the point of view of resilience assessment and assessment needs, this chapter overviews a modelling framework for the analysis of interdependencies in Electric Power Systems (EPS), adopting a state-based stochastic approach. First, it is shown how the selected approach deals with the interdependencies, complexity, heterogeneity and scalability dictated by the infrastructures involved in the energy sector (i.e., the electric and control infrastructures). Major aspects of the framework implementation are then discussed, and some illustrative examples of different typologies of analysis are provided on selected EPS scenarios.