Even with sophisticated information and control systems, decision making in critical infrastructure management is a challenge. This holds for normal and near-normal operations, and even more for crisis management. The system behavior is too complex to be fully accessible by human intuition. Though human expertise is an indispensable pre-requisite to manage such complex systems, the analysis of system behavior and the prediction of changes need special purpose simulations which take the specific modes of system behavior into account. That’s why CI information and control systems include special purpose simulations (such as, for instance, N-1 contingency analysis in power grids). They are an essential pre-requisite to understand and manage the complexity.
Today, these simulation systems are highly adapted to the specific domains. They are based on the assumption to completely know the state of their critical infrastructures. Both assumptions are not adequate for dependent critical infrastructures with external ICT systems. They are not suited for holistic risk management in such dependent networks of networks. What is needed is an integrative information management with federated simulations bringing the different system behaviors together.