Inter-infrastructure modeling — Ports and telecommunications

During the past year, Bell Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratories have been modeling and simulating cross-industry interactions between infrastructures and the cascading of impacts under disruption scenarios. Critical national infrastructures for importing and exporting goods and materials (e.g., seaboard shipping through ports on the U.S. East and West Coasts) require the support of other industries to conduct business. For example, ports rely on the grid of information networks (voice, data, Internet) to communicate; they also rely on the power grid to operate machinery and the transportation grid to distribute the goods and materials. While information networks, power networks, and transportation networks tend to be highly reliable, disruptions can lead to extended outages requiring days/weeks to repair. These outages can cause shutdown of port operations, resulting in severe financial losses for the economy. This paper describes just one of those inter-infrastructure dependencies: by simulating a port and the interactions with the telecommunications infrastructure, it describes the impacts on both the flow of goods and materials through ports and the economic impact on the ports under a telecommunications disruption scenario.