Vulnerable Systems

The safe management of the complex distributed systems and critical infrastructures which constitute the backbone of modern industry and society entails identifying and quantifying their vulnerabilities to design adequate protection, mitigation, and emergency action against failure. In practice, there is no fail-safe solution to such problems and various frameworks are being proposed to effectively integrate different methods of complex systems analysis in a problem-driven approach to their solution. __Vulnerable Systems__ reflects the current state of knowledge on the procedures which are being put forward for the risk and vulnerability analysis of critical infrastructures. Classical methods of reliability and risk analysis, as well as new paradigms based on network and systems theory, including simulation, are considered in a dynamic and holistic way. Readers of __Vulnerable Systems__ will benefit from its structured presentation of the current knowledge base on this subject. It will enable graduate students, researchers and safety and risk analysts to understand the methods suitable for different phases of analysis and to identify their criticalities in application. Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Introduction and Definition of Key Terms....Pages 1-7 Properties of Critical Infrastructures....Pages 9-31 Challenges to Methods for the Vulnerability Analysis of Critical Infrastructures....Pages 33-39 Basic Approaches....Pages 41-54 Conceptual Frameworks for Vulnerability Assessment....Pages 55-64 Methods of Analysis....Pages 65-193 Concluding Considerations....Pages 195-204 This up-to-date and authoritative volume, written by experts in the field, covers the latest research on procedures used to assess the risk to, and vulnerability of, critical infrastructures such as telephone networks and the electricity distribution system.