An ontological approach to simulate critical infrastructures

This paper presents a Knowledge Base System (KBS) as a key component of a federated simulation framework aimed at investigating the dependencies among Critical Infrastructures (CIs). The KBS, based on the ontological formalism, represents the properties and the relations of each simulation domain and the dependency relations among different domains. Some auxiliary data structures, necessary to model the interaction among the simulators of different CIs, have been defined and have been populated through suitable queries to the KBS. The adoption of the ontological formalism allowed the definition of a common formalism to deal with the heterogeneity arising from the presence of different domains.

Research highlights▶ The paper describes the architecture of a Knowledge Base System that allows the definition of a common formalism to model Critical Infrastructures (CIs), their interconnections and dependencies. ▶ The KBS represents a key component of a federated simulation framework aimed at investigating the dependencies among (CIs) using domain simulators. ▶ The KBS allows the proposal of a flexible federated simulation framework supporting the explicit separation of the Scenario Definition Phase from the Federated Simulation Phase. ▶ The proposed federated simulation framework and the KBS have been used in actual federated simulation experiments, to study the global behaviour of the resulting “System of System” under different conditions and constraints (e.g. parameter variations or changes of the environmental conditions).