SPCI 503
Physical Critical Infrastructures

Course Introduction

Welcome to SPCI 503! This course starts with a discussion of the origins and emerging definitions of critical infrastructures and their interdependencies, and then examines the fundamental challenges to critical infrastructure protection.
We will deepen our understanding of infrastructure systems and systems analysis through a study of the theory of networks and modeling and simulation. In this course we begin our formal introduction to vulnerability analysis through the study and application of a Model-Based Vulnerability Analysis (MBVA) approach recently developed for application to critical infrastructure protection. You'll examine other approaches to vulnerability assessment in the Risk Management course you will be taking later in the SPCI Program.
This course focuses on physical critical infrastructure systems including power and fuel systems, SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition and Telecommunications) systems, telecommunications, and water supply. We will analyze basic elements of these systems; identify their vulnerability to breakdown due to accidents, natural disasters, or terrorist attacks; and examine best practices used to reduce these vulnerabilities. We'll identify databases and information systems available for each of these infrastructure systems. We will focus on developing systems analyses and models of the infrastructures and on strategic responses to breakdown scenarios, including the use of MBVA.

Learning Objectives

When you have completed this course, you will be able to

• employ various definitions of critical infrastructure;
• identify the interdependencies among critical infrastructure systems;
• identify and explain the major challenges to critical infrastructure protection;
• explain network theory and compare and contrast with classical systems theory;
• differentiate between scale-free and small world networks;
• define and apply basic network theory concepts, such as trees, nodes, cascade networks, links, degree of nodes, frequency of nodes, and plotting the frequency of nodes on histograms;
• identify and describe the steps in Model Based Vulnerability Analysis;
• apply MBVA to an infrastructure system, including the development of a network graph, histogram, and appropriate tables;
• analyze the strengths and weaknesses of an application of MBVA to an infrastructure system;
• explain how the economic characteristics of an infrastructure system affect its vulnerability;
• identify major components, hubs, and links, vulnerabilities, major threat scenarios, and best practices for each of the infrastructure systems covered in this course;
• for each of the infrastructure systems, identify and describe interdependencies with other systems, and organizational and human resources challenges; and
• identify and evaluate methods for obtaining estimates of the probability of different threats.

The Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the discussion forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.

• You can use e-mail to ask the instructor a question or preferably post your question on the discussion forum. The instructor will reply to all discussion forum questions on the forum, and to e-mail questions via e-mail.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

About This Course

Course Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course.

Required Materials

The required text for this course is Ted Lewis's Critical Infrastructure Protection in Homeland Security: Defending a Networked Nation. (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley & Sons. 2006. ISBN: 0471786284.) Other required readings are online; you'll find links in relevant lessons.

Recommended Materials

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. New York: Penguin Group, 2003. ISBN 0-452-28439-2

Technology Requirements and Skills

In addition to the technology requirements and skills noted in the Online Student Handbook, for this course you will need:

• Adobe Reader
• Quicktime (TM), to view video clips on the Lewis CD (included with the text) and in Lesson Five
• JAVA, to run the applications on the Lewis CD
• Flash and Shockwave, for the Lewis CD

Course Organization

This course is organized into 9 lessons; each includes readings from the Lewis text and other sources, and an online commentary. The commentaries are substantive, so take the time to read them thoroughly. Most lessons also include an assignment such as exercises taken from the Lewis text, an online discussion, or work toward the major course project.

About the Lessons

Lesson One: Critical Infrastructure and Its Challenges

Topics

• History, definitions, and the relationship to homeland security; challenges in critical infrastructure protections
• Critical infrastructures as public goods
• How do the economic characteristics of an infrastructure system affect its vulnerability? Critical infrastructures and public goods; effects of deregulation on vulnerability
• Infrastructure Interdependencies

Readings

• Lewis, chapters 1–3
• James Peerenboom. Undated. Infrastructure Interdependencies: Overview of Concepts and Terminology. Infrastructure Assurance Center. Argonne National Laboratory.
• The White House. February 2003. The National Strategy for Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets
• Lewis, Ted and Rudy Darken. "Potholes and Detours in the Road to Critical Infrastructure Protection Policy." Homeland Security Affairs I, no. 2 (Fall 2005). Available online at: http://www.hsaj.org/?article=1.2.1

Assignment

Exercises from Lewis, chapters 1–3

Lesson Two: Network Theory and Its Application to Critical Infrastructures

Topics

• Self-organization, emergent behavior, and networks
• Properties of networks
• Developing Network Graphs, nodes, and links
• Scale-free networks and how to test for them
• Small-world networks
• Critical infrastructures as emergent networks

Readings

Lewis, chapter 4

Assignments

• Exercises from Lewis, chapter 4
• Discussion Assignment: Run the Termites PowerGraph, ShortestLink, and CascadeNet applications. Post your findings to the Assignment 2 discussion area; review the postings of your classmates, and revise your response in a final posting, taking into account your teammates' responses.

Lesson Three: Introduction to Risk Analysis

Topics

• Vulnerability Analysis
• Introduction to the MBVA
• Analyzing networks
• Fault Tree Analysis–logic tables
• AND and OR gates
• Methods for estimating probabilities of threat scenarios

Readings

Lewis, chapter 5

Assignments

Exercises from Lewis, chapters 5

Lesson Four: Introduction to Resource Allocation

Topics

• Method for resource allocation for risk reduction to critical nodes
• The concept of infrastructure availability
• NetworkAnalysis software
• Resource allocation using FTplus
• Manual, apportion, rank-order and optimal risk reduction scenarios
• Fault probability versus financial risk reduction
• Application of MBVA to San Francisco's water supply system

Readings

Lewis, chapter 6 and 7

Assignments

Exercises from Lewis, chapters 6 and 7

• Discussion assignment: Run NetworkAnalysis and FTplus simulations. Post your responses to the Assignment 4 discussion area; review the postings of your classmates, and revise your response in a final posting, taking into account your teammates' responses.
• Begin major project.

Lesson Five: SCADA—Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition

Topics

• What is SCADA and is it a critical infrastructure?
• Government oversight
• Vulnerabilities and best practices
• Analysis of SFO Water SCADA case
• Bellingham gasoline pipeline accident, June 10, 1999

Reading

Lewis, chapter 8
Recommended:

• Pipeline Accident Report. Pipeline Rupture and Subsequent Fire Bellingham, WA, June 10, 1999. NTSB, 2002. (PDF, 88 pages)
• Interview with Joe Weiss. Sandia SCADA Center. PBS: April 24, 2003.

Assignment

• Exercises from Lewis, chapters 8
• Continue work on major project

Lesson Six: Telecommunications

Topics

• Organizational context of telecommunications
• Three major telecommunications infrastructures and their characteristics
• Vulnerabilities and best practices

Reading

Lewis, chapter 11

Assignment

• Exercises from Lewis, chapter 11
• Continue work on major project

Lesson Seven: Power Grids as Engineering Systems

Topics

• Components of a power grid and flow of energy from generation to load
• Facts and laws that make the power grid the most complex critical infrastructure, e.g., lack of effective storage capacity for electricity; power generation must equal power consumption at all times; effective lack of flow control except by stopping it through circuit breakers.
• How blackouts may occur
• Vulnerabilities of power systems
• Procedure for restoring service after a blackout
• Causes of a historic blackout

Readings

• Lewis, Chapter 9
• US/Canada Power Outage Task Force. Sept. 12, 2003. Initial Blackout Timeline. August 14, 2003. Outage Sequence of Event

Assignments

• Exercises from Lewis, chapter 9
• Discussion Assignment: How does the network theory approach to critical infrastructures and MBVA address the spatial dimension of critical infrastructures? Can some problems be addressed by interpreting some links as hubs? What are the built-in biases of this approach to vulnerability analysis? Post your responses to the Assignment 7 discussion area; review the postings of your classmates, and revise your response in a final posting, taking into account your teammates' responses.
• Continue work on major project

Lesson Eight: Power Grids as Markets

Topics

• Regulation and deregulation of the electricity industry
• Current status of the deregulation process in the U.S.
• Major issues related to the deregulation of the electricity industry
• Method of "red teaming" to develop attack scenarios
• Vulnerability analysis of power grid threats
• Computer simulations for power grid analysis, e.g., PowerGrid and Rnet
• Best practices

Reading

Thomas Overbye. 2000.Reengineering the Electric Grid. American Scientist. 88(3): 220.

Assignment

• Report on the infrastructure for your major project

Lesson Nine: Energy

Topics

• Properties of petroleum and natural gas
• Regulatory framework of the energy sector
• Components of the petroleum and natural gas energy systems
• Major threats of the petroleum and natural gas energy systems
• Critical components of the energy sector
• Model-based vulnerability analyses of the energy sector
• Best practices for this sector

Reading

• Lewis, chapter 10

Assignment

• Exercises from Lewis, chapter 11
• Continue work on major project

Major Project

Complete major project

About the Assignments

There are three types of assignments in this course:

• Exercises in most lessons.
• Participation in three group discussion forums
• A major project, due at the end of the quarter

Assignments are weighted as shown in Table i.1, below.

Table i.1—Assignments and Percentage of Grade

Component	Percent of Final Grade
Exercises	20
Participation in three group discussion forums	20
Major Project	60

Exercises

Assignments 1–7 and 9 include one or more sets of exercises from the ends of chapters in the Lewis text. These questions are true/false or multiple-choice. You will use an online quiz format called WebQ to complete these exercises. WebQ will grade your exercises automatically, show you the correct answers, and report your scores to you and your instructor. Participation in these exercises will count toward 20 percent of your grade

Discussion Forums

You are required to participate in three discussions in this course, for Lessons Two, Four, and Seven. The topics are noted on the assignments for these lessons. You will have two weeks to post comments in the forum. You will be required to make a one-page, substantive post responding to the topic question and read the postings of all your classmates in preparation for either

• summarizing points where you agree and disagree with one posting; or
• submitting a revised posting, taking into account what you learned from the work of your classmates. You will submit all work through the relevant discussion forums.

The work for these three discussions comprises 20 percent of your grade.

Major Project

A major project based on the readings is due at the end of the quarter. For this project, you will select an infrastructure system from among those studied in this course (but excluding the specific examples covered in the course) and conduct an MBVA. This project comprises 60 percent of your total grade. In the project, you will

• select an infrastructure;
• list assets;
• perform network analysis;
• identify potential vulnerabilities of the system and build a model using a fault tree;
• estimate probabilities;
• analyze model using an event tree;
• compute optimal resource allocation—assume you have only 20 percent of the money needed to cure all faults; and
• identify best practices to address the vulnerabilities and estimate cost for the measures.

Please submit the major project according to the instructions in "About Your Instructor" in your online course syllabus.

Note: If you have questions that you don't want to discuss with the entire class, you may e-mail your instructor directly per the directions on the "About Your Instructor" page in your online syllabus.

Your instructor reserves the right to post your direct questions—anonymously—on the discussion board if the questions seem important or representative enough that the entire class would benefit from them.

Grading and Assessment

You will receive a numeric grade for this course. The numeric grading system used by the University of Washington relies on a decimal scale between 1.7 (low) and 4.0 (high).

For graduate courses, grades below 1.7 are recorded as 0.0 and no credit is earned. A minimum of 2.7 is required in each course that is counted toward a graduate degree. A 3.0 cumulative average in graduate work is required to receive a graduate degree.

Grading Criteria

Grades on the assignments will be based on

• addressing all parts of each assignment;
• providing adequate treatment of each part of the assignment (for example, if an item calls for an explanation of factors involved, an answer that lists factors without explaining them will be inadequate);
• relating your work on the assignments to course readings, lessons, threaded discussions or supplementary readings as appropriate; and
• documenting your sources (that is, providing citations to published material, government documents, personal interviews).

Assignments that are partially completed will not be graded.

Here are descriptions of the criteria for your performance in this class. If you meed these criteria for all your work, you will be graded appropriately. Instructors may "interpolate" grades between these standards as they see fit.

4.0	Excellent and exceptional work for a graduate student. Work at this level is consistently creative (where appropriate), thorough, well-reasoned, insightful, well written and shows clear recognition and incisive understanding of the important materials and issues. All assignments submitted are of good professional quality. The value of individual contributions to this course is considerable and positively affects the learning of all participants.
3.7	Strong work for a graduate student. Work at this level sometimes shows signs of creativity, is thorough and well reasoned, and demonstrates clear recognition and good understanding of the important materials and issues. Assignments submitted lack professional quality but demonstrate effort and concern for quality. The value of individual contributions to the course is strong and occasionally significant.
3.3	Competent and sound work for a graduate student. Work is well reasoned and thorough but not especially creative or insightful. The student shows adequate understanding of the important materials and issues although that understanding may be somewhat incomplete. Work submitted is competent but not remarkable. The value of individual contributions to the course is such that they do not influence the quality of the course one way or the other. This grade indicates neither exceptional strengths nor exceptional weaknesses, but is the grade for "average" graduate performance.
3.0	Adequate work for a graduate student. Work is moderately thorough and well reasoned, but with some indications that some of the important materials and issues is less than complete and perhaps inadequate for graduate study. The value of individual contributions to the course is minimal. However, the work is above the minimal expectations for the course.
2.7	Borderline work for a graduate student. Work barely meets the minimal expectations for the course and may occasionally fall below them. Understanding of the important materials and issues is incomplete or has not been demonstrated. There is little positive value in the individual contributions to the course and there may even be negative effects on the overall learning. Consistent overall performance at this level would be below that of adequate graduate student performance.

Study Tips

Exercises from the Lewis text are open-book, so no memorization is involved in the course. The course is designed for you to learn from readings and from completing the assignments
Some hints:

• Pace yourself.
• Set aside time each week that is dedicated exclusively to the course.
• Do the readings first, then answer the exercise questions while information is fresh at hand.
• Begin assignments as soon as possible after completing the readings. Use all available resources, including your fellow classmates.
• For the assignments, select an infrastructure system that you have a real interest in.

About the Course Developer

Hilda Blanco is a Professor and Chair of the Urban Design and Planning Department at the University of Washington. She obtained her Masters (1984) and Ph.D. (1989) degrees in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. Her professional experience in public planning includes work for the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, the New Jersey Office of State Planning, and the NY and NJ Port Authority, as well as various national and international research grants and consultancies. Prof. Blanco specializes in planning theory, including systems analysis and strategic planning. Her book, How to Think about Social Problems (1994), and several articles in professional journals focus on the planning process. She is an expert in state growth management programs and teaches graduate courses in infrastructure and local finance.

The development of this course was a collaborative project. Most of the lessons of this course used much material from Ted Lewis's PowerPoint lectures, which he graciously made available. In addition, the lessons on the power grid also were developed with the assistance of Profs. Chen-Ching Liu (Electrical Engineering, UW) and Jacques Lawarree (Economics, UW); the lesson on energy was developed with the assistance of Duane Henderson from Puget Sound Energy. Prof. Edward McCormack (Civil and Environmental Engineering, UW) has updated and revised portions of the course.

---

©2003–2008, University of Washington. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.