SK-BASED PROTECTION OF CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE USING INTELLIGENT DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

Abstract

Critical infrastructure is a key component to providing essential services that keeps people supplied during disasters, including energy, transportation, healthcare, water supply, telecommunications and emergency management. As physical infrastructure has become more interdependent with digital technologies, operation has become more efficient and infrastructure systems are vulnerable to a variety of physical, cyber, environmental and operational threats. Protection models such as periodical inspections and reactive response strategies are no longer effective to deal with the complexity of modern infrastructure environments. The proposed Risk Based Protection Framework Using Intelligent Decision Support Systems (IDSS) is aimed at improving the resilience and security of critical infrastructure. The proposed scope includes the integration of structured risk assessment, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), predictive analytics, Digital Twin technology and intelligent decision support into a single architecture for proactive infrastructure management. These are broken down into seven broad stages: data acquisition, threat identification, vulnerability assessment, risk analysis, AI-based prediction, intelligent decision support, continuous monitoring. To illustrate the practical application of the proposed framework, a conceptual case study on an infrastructure for a hospital is presented. The findings show that the combination of AI and risk-based decision support can have a profound positive impact on threat detection, infrastructure monitoring, resource prioritization, emergency response planning and increase the overall infrastructure resilience. The proposed framework is flexible, applicable to different sectors of critical infrastructure, such as energy, transportation, healthcare, water management, telecommunications, airports, smart cities. The research is a step towards designing proactive and intelligent infrastructure protection strategies, which can tackle the challenges facing today's critical infrastructure systems using evidence.