Vulnerable Systems

Book excerpt: The safe management of the complex distributed systems and critical infrastructures which constitute the backbone of modern industry and society entails identifying and quantifying their vulnerabilities to design adequate protection, mitigation, and emergency action against failure. In practice, there is no fail-safe solution to such problems and various frameworks are being proposed to effectively integrate different methods of complex systems analysis in a problem-driven approach to their solution. Vulnerable Systems reflects the current state of knowledge on the procedures which are being put forward for the risk and vulnerability analysis of critical infrastructures. Classical methods of reliability and risk analysis, as well as new paradigms based on network and systems theory, including simulation, are considered in a dynamic and holistic way. Readers of Vulnerable Systems will benefit from its structured presentation of the current knowledge base on this subject. It will enable graduate students, researchers and safety and risk analysts to understand the methods suitable for different phases of analysis and to identify their criticalities in application.