Due to the increasing frequencies of natural disasters as well as potential terrorist attacks, the protection of critical infrastructures from natural and man-made catastrophic events is a central challenge of the 21st century. On the other hand, the volatile critical infrastructures are getting even more challenging to manage since their scale as well as complexity and mutual interdependence grows. Furthermore, new technology paradigms such as All-IP networks and Smart Grid functionality are blurring the classical domain boundaries and facilitate novel attack types.

The latter aspect in particular can lead to cascading failure effects where the malfunction of neuralgic infrastructure elements brings down entire systems through hidden or explicit dependencies. A prominent recent example endangering energy supply as well as international security has been the emergence of Stuxnet, a worm that attacked SCADA systems.

ILIas will develop intelligent solutions for protecting critical infrastructures that provide electricity and telecommunication services to the general public. These solutions need to be scalable and reconcile the need for fast automated reaction with manual supervision for highly critical decisions.

In order to achieve these goals, a service-oriented multiagent architecture is employed. This flexible peer-to-peer-based distributed management system will provide a robust and fault tolerant foundation for the network analysis and administration functionalities, ensuring data availability and system control in case of different network failures. Isolated nodes will locally ensure minimum system stability until overall control can be reestablished.

DAI-Labor develops a software solution for simulating attack scenarios and evaluating protection mechanism efficiencies in large-scale networks. The simulation models are supplemented by a hardware test laboratory where exemplary symbiotic energy and telecommunication infrastructures are set up. Both environments will be used for cross-validation to ensure the validity as well as real world applicability of our proposed solutions.

The simulation models are supplemented by a hardware test laboratory where exemplary symbiotic energy and telecommunication infrastructures are set up. Both environments will be used for cross-validation to ensure the validity as well as real world applicability of our proposed solutions.