title: Critical Infrastructure Vulnerability to Spatially Localized Failures with Applications to Chinese Railway System.
abstract: This article studies a general type of initiating events in critical infrastructures, called spatially localized failures (SLFs), which are defined as the failure of a set of infrastructure components distributed in a spatially localized area due to damage sustained, while other components outside the area do not directly fail. These failures can be regarded as a special type of intentional attack, such as bomb or explosive assault, or a generalized modeling of the impact of localized natural hazards on large-scale systems. This article introduces three SLFs models: node centered SLFs, district-based SLFs, and circle-shaped SLFs, and proposes a SLFs-induced vulnerability analysis method from three aspects: identification of critical locations, comparisons of infrastructure vulnerability to random failures, topologically localized failures and SLFs, and quantification of infrastructure information value. The proposed SLFs-induced vulnerability analysis method is finally applied to the Chinese railway system and can be also easily adapted to analyze other critical infrastructures for valuable protection suggestions.
authors.affiliation: School of Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.|Key Lab. for Image Processing and Intelligent Control, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
authors.forename: Min
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ouyang
authors.affiliation: School of Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Tian
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rice University, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Zhenghua
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.|Key Lab. for Image Processing and Intelligent Control, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
authors.forename: Liu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hong
authors.affiliation: College of Public Administration, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
authors.forename: Zijun
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Mao
keywords: Chinese railway system; critical infrastructures; spatially localized failures; vulnerability