The accelerated social-economic development in the past decades has made modern life dependent on a series of physical systems, economic, financial, information and educational services and facilities that we use for different purposes all the time.
We depend on electric power, water, processed food and emergency medical assistance, education and information, financial services and administration and we benefit from transport and different other electronic means of communications.
The protection of life and way of living aims to ensure the uninterrupted and safe operation of these infrastructures that are vital to society and that depend on different sources of energy (heat, hydraulic, wind and electric), services and facilities at a standard level imposed by the permanently developing modern society.
In the event of serious disruptions in services and facilities indispensable to the daily activity of people or the society, it is easy to understand, without further details, that critical infrastructures can be traced or they themselves are those production capacities, emergency or community services and other administrative facilities designed to ensure the services imposed by modern society and that the interruption of their normal operation can affect the humans’ daily way of living and can especially damage or even destroy human life.
The infrastructures operated nationally, continentally or globally are every day more dependent on other infrastructures and services, energy sources and resour-ces, highly technological and information distribution systems, both vertically and horizontally, to other critical infrastructures and services that are vital to worldwide human communities.
Modern critical infrastructures are based on the ability to interconnect with different systems and networks and to supply global operation for sending information and coordinating their operation due to the interdependency relations in the best way possible. To that end, it is necessary to adopt a modern approach and study these infrastructures from the point of view of a complex architecture, the so-called “system of systems”.
The danger of a chain disturbance, due to the dependency and interdependency aspects of critical infrastructures, requires new concepts and instruments to assess the behaviour of these systems and their impact on the infrastructures they influence.
Critical infrastructures have always been a sensitive area, the most vulnerable aspect of any system or process. This sensitivity springs from their special role in the structure, stability and operation of a complex system or process.
Presently, due to major events caused by extreme meteorological phenomena, natural disasters, catastrophes, dange-rous geological phenomena, extraordinary situations with biological-social character, terrorist acts, technological or human accidents and other dangers, human communities have finally reached a joint conclusion: modern societies are much more fragile and, consequently, more exposed to unexpected or unpredictable situations.
by PhD Eng. Septimiu Caceu
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