The overall functioning of public life and economic and social development depends on critical infrastructures (ICs) such as electricity or telecommunications networks. The European project IRRIIS (“Integrated Risk Reduction of Information-based Infrastructure Systems”) focused on protecting these infrastructures.
The extensive use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has been extended to other infrastructures, being more and more intelligent, interconnected, complex, interdependent, and therefore vulnerable.
IRRIIS increased the reliability, survivability and resilience of these structures and:
- Determined a set of requirements from both the public and private scenarios based on detailed data analysis.
- Developed MIT (Middleware Improved Technology), a collection of software components that facilitate communication between different infrastructures and suppliers. Supporting recovery actions and increasing service stability in case of critical situations, MIT components substantially improve the safety of large critical infrastructures.
- Built SimCIP (Simulation for Critical Infrastructure Protection), a simulation environment for controlled experimentation with a major focus on interdependency in ICs. The simulator is used to increase understanding of the ICs and their interdependencies, identifying potential problems and developing appropriate solutions to validate and test the MIT components.
The other project partners were:
- Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (Germany)
- Ente per le Nuove Tecnologie, l’Energia e l’Ambiente (Italy)
- Supériere Ecole Nationale des Telecommunications (France)
- Siemens AG (Germany)
- Telecom Italia SpA (Italy)
- Centre for Software Reliability at City University London (United Kingdom)
- Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (Switzerland)
- Alcatel Lucent (France)
- The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (Netherlands)
- VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (Finland)
- Advanced Industrial Systems Ltd. (Malta)
- Red Eléctrica of Spain (Spain)
- Industrieanlagen-Betriebsgesellschaft mbH (Germany)
- Distribuzione ACEA SpA (Italy)
Grupo AIA’s role was to provide consulting expertise in the electricity network in order to build a coherent model of failure analysis.
The project was developed between 2006 and 2009.
