Modeling of Risks Threatening Critical Infrastructures: System Approach

The objective of this paper is to model interconnectivities among systems and subsystems of transport and critical infrastructures vulnerable to climatic events that impose the highest impacts on people and regional economies from chronic to episodic events. To achieve this objective, the study first lays out a high-level conceptual map of the interacting complex systems, then depicts some of the interconnections between and within these complex systems as related to climatic events. By outlining these interconnectivities at a high-level, analytical approach, the strategic risk register system (SRRS) is introduced to demonstrate the feasibility of capturing these interactions and links analytically, and ultimately to model risks and threats imposed on transport and civil and public systems due to climatic events. A hypothetical episodic event is initiated to examine the credibility of the methodology and the applicability of the proposed technique to model the infrastructures' connectivity and risks imposed on the infrastructures. The outcomes demonstrate that as the level of connectivity decreases, the potency value increases. (C) 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.