Aviation Transportation, Cyber Threats, and Network-of-Networks: Modeling Perspectives for Translating Theory to Practice

Understanding aviation transportation infrastructure system behavior and coupling with communication networks is essential for securing and restoring functionality against cyber-enabled threats. While significant progress has been made in the past decade on developing infrastructure resilience theories based on network structure and operations, translating and generalizing them to real-world practice has often been challenging due to imperfect data and inapplicability of modeling assumptions. These typically include: 1) stylized network structures without uncertainty, 2) node homogeneity, 3) static criticality measures, and 4) unrealistic cascade models originating from single points of failure. This paper presents the modeling perspectives and approaches that aim to address these theory-to-practice challenges using a well-grounded network-of-networks (NoN) construct. Real-world modeling challenges are identified and a network theory-guided conceptual NoN model is developed that may be operationalized with the U.S. national airspace system airport network and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) communication network as an application domain.