Protecting Critical Infrastructures in Crisis Situations

Critical infrastructures (CIs) are located at the heart of today’s social life and provide a multitude of vital services to society. Thus, incidents happening within critical infrastructures can have far-reaching impacts, affecting the people located in the vicinity of the infrastructure as well as dependent organizations. In such crisis situations, it is important to be aware of potential consequences, to coordinate crisis response teams accordingly and to keep the population informed about emergency plans.

In this track, we are interested in novel approaches, concepts and methodologies to improve the protection of CIs to preemptively prepare against natural or man-made hazards as well as to increase resilience of CIs in crisis situations. Besides results from theoretical work, we would also encourage the presentation of technological solutions (e.g., prototypes) implementing those methodologies as well as use case scenarios and empirical studies, which provide insights in real-life applications and the occurring problems. The aim is to bring together experts from the scientific area as well as practitioners to discuss approaches from different fields of application and incorporate multiple views on the topic.

TRACK FORMAT

The track will build on regular paper presentations, but we plan to have a short panel at the end of the session including all speakers. This should give the audience the opportunity to directly engage in a conversation with the experts and to engage in discussions going beyond the individual topics of the talks. Depending on submissions, live demos of developed tools are also possible to showcase practical solutions to the addressed topics.

 

TRACK TOPICS

  • Assessing threats and risks in CIs
  • Approaches making CI networks more resilient
  • Identifying and measuring impacts on the society
  • Identifying and measuring cascading effects
  • Concepts to coordinate between CIs and first responders in crisis situations
  • Concepts for emergency population warning systems
  • Technical solutions for communicating with people in crisis situations
  • Simulating the propagation of threats and their impacts
  • Methods of cyber and physical situational awareness systems

 

TRACK CO-CHAIRS

Stefan Schauer
Austrian Institute of Technology

Stefan Schauer is a researcher at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) and is involved in several national and international research projects in the context of critical infrastructures.

Both chairs are experienced in organizing special tracks and also have organized the GameSec 2017 conference in the past. They have published an edited volume on the application of game theory in risk management and contributed articles in several journals on critical infrastructure protection. Further, they have been involved in last year’s ISCRAM conference with a paper in the “Planning, Foresight and Risk Analysis” track, which was related to the topic proposed here.
Stefan Rass
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Stefan Rass is associated professor at the University of Klagenfurt working in the fields of risk and security management and has been editor for several special issues in different journals on these topics.