Critical location identification and vulnerability analysis of interdependent infrastructure systems under spatially localized attacks

• We propose a method to identify critical locations in interdependent infrastructures.
• Geographical interdependencies and attack radius largely affect critical locations.
• Localized attacks cause less vulnerability than equivalent random failures.
• Whether considering both node and edge failures affects critical locations.
• Topology-based critical locations are also critical from flow-based perspective.

Infrastructure systems are usually spatially distributed in a wide area and are subject to many types of hazards. For each type of hazards, modeling their direct impact on infrastructure components and analyzing their induced system-level vulnerability are important for identifying mitigation strategies. This paper mainly studies spatially localized attacks that a set of infrastructure components located within or crossing a circle shaped spatially localized area is subject to damage while other components do not directly fail. For this type of attacks, taking interdependent power and gas systems in Harris County, Texas, USA as an example, this paper proposes an approach to exactly identify critical locations in interdependent infrastructure systems and make pertinent vulnerability analysis. Results show that (a) infrastructure interdependencies and attack radius largely affect the position of critical locations; (b) spatially localized attacks cause less vulnerability than equivalent random failures; (c) in most values of attack radius critical locations identified by considering only node failures do not change when considering both node and edge failures in the attack area; (d) for many values of attack radius critical locations identified by topology-based model are also critical from the flow-based perspective.