On the vulnerability of critical infrastructures: ''seeing it coming''

The paper addresses a number of concerns that are manifest in the safety management of critical infrastructures (CI) including, and especially, the effects of an increasing complexity on the safety managers’ ability to comprehend and monitor the stability, predictability, and manoeuvrability of the systems at hand; the perverse effect of computer ubiquity on the CI safety quality; and, entailing these – the frustrating governance crises recurrently rippling the history of critical infrastructures. Based on a couple of illustrative working examples derived from the nonlinear dynamics, a call is launched, for an innovative re-appraisal of the enlightening potential of the established resources in applied mathematics, applied systems theory, physics models, biology paradigms and other ‘on-the-shelf’ tools, in view of meeting the current demand for a secured performance and overall safety in critical infrastructures and the society at large.