Interdependency modeling and emergency response

In large-scale disaster events, infrastructure owners are faced with many challenges in deciding the allocation ofresources for preparation and response actions. This decision process involves building situation awareness, evaluating course of action, and effecting response. This paper describes a modeling and simulation system called CIMS that presents a visual environment for assessing the causal effects of events and actions in complex environments. Specifically, CIMS provides a framework for evaluating cascading effects associated with infrastructure interdependencies, thus providing greater situational awareness to infrastructure owners and decisionmakers. This paper first presents the area of interdependency analysis and then presents CIMS as a network framework for simulating the interactions between multiple infrastructures. Also introduced is the integration of infrastructure simulation with a decision support systems.