Geographic Hotspots of Critical National Infrastructure

Area of Science:

• Infrastructure resilience
• Network analysis
• Risk assessment

Background:

• National infrastructure failures cause significant societal and economic disruption.
• Understanding asset criticality and geographic location is key to risk reduction and resilience enhancement.
• Existing studies often lack integrated, high-resolution data on infrastructure networks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To provide new insights into the criticality of real-life critical infrastructure networks.
• To propose a novel metric for infrastructure criticality based on user disruption.
• To identify critical infrastructure hotspots in England and Wales.

Main Methods:

• Integration of high-resolution data on infrastructure location, connectivity, interdependence, and usage.
• Development of a user-disruption-based criticality metric.
• Application of kernel density estimation to identify criticality hotspots.
• Analysis of 200,000 failure scenarios across energy, transport, water, waste, and digital communications sectors.

Main Results:

• Identification of critical infrastructure hotspots, frequently located at the periphery of urban areas.
• Hotspots are associated with large, user-dependent facilities or concentrations of multiple critical infrastructures.
• The study provides a comprehensive national-scale demonstration for England and Wales.

Conclusions:

• The developed criticality metric and hotspot identification method offer valuable tools for targeted investment in infrastructure resilience.
• Understanding spatial concentrations of criticality is essential for effective risk management.
• Findings highlight the importance of considering interdependencies and user impact in infrastructure planning.