Decision Making in Crisis Management : Time Criticality Assessment

The paper is proposing a methodology for assessing the time-criticality in the scope of a crisis resulting from a cascade of disruptions of a set of Critical Infrastructures (CIs). The success of the management of the crisis depends on taking the good decisions and undertaking the corresponding actions at the good timing. Identifying time intervals for decisions and actions requires dynamic models capable to assess the crisis time evolution. While, measuring the “criticality” of different time-intervals requires the use of suitable metrics. Based on previous works for modelling cascade of CIs’ disruptions incorporating CIs dependency and vulnerability, the authors propose a methodology to assess the time-criticality and propose the appropriate metrics. The methodology is based on the idea of comparing the time-profile of a given cascade of disruptions between two configurations: unstressed and stressed CIs. The CIs become stressed under the action of a threat and combined with the dependency between CIs. The unstressed configuration represents a risk-noise. Two metrics are proposed in order to carry on the comparison between the time-profiles of the stressed and the unstressed CIs. The proposed metrics are: the time to attend 90% of the asymptotic occurrence probability and the time to attend the most probable occurrence rate, describing the cascade likelihood. An academic case is presented in order to demonstrate the applicability of the methodology and illustrate some interesting features.