The interrelationships between critical infrastructures (CIs) have become more complex, rendering the security and resilience management of cyber-physical attacks and natural hazard threats more challenging. Recent research and emerging solutions focus on the protection of individual CIs, however, the interrelationships between CIs has become more complex and managing the impacts of cascading effects and enabling rapid recovery is becoming more pertinent and highly challenging.
To address this challenge, PRECINCT will deliver a framework specification for systematic CI security and resilience management, a cross-facility collaborative management infrastructure enabling stakeholder communities to create AI-based PRECINCT ecosystems and increased resilience support services, a vulnerability assessment tool using serious games, and PRECINCT Digital Twins (DTs). These concepts and capabilities will be validated in four large-scale Living Labs (LLs)and transferability validation demonstrators, where cascading effects will be considered for CI in Multi-Modal Transport, Energy, ICT/Telecoms, threat scenarios.
In full alignment with EU policy, particularly the pillars of the new EU Security Union Strategy for the period 2020 to 2025, PRECINCT is addressing cascading effects in CI system of systems (Multi-Modal Transport, Energy, ICT/Telecoms, Water) and focuses on enhanced resilience including ‘rapid recovery’.
PRECINCT recognises both the increase of combined physical and cyber-attacks due to their interdependencies and the budgetary constraints on public and private sectors requiring
security solutions to be more accurate, efficient, cost-effective, and automated than the ones currently available.
The EU-funded PRECINCT project will connect private and public CI stakeholders in a geographical area to a cyber-physical security management method that will produce a protected territory for citizens and CIs.
The involvement of 11 CIs representing the transport, water, energy and ICT sectors and 2 law enforcement agencies as active project partners, covering different type of CIs (private/public), size and geographical distribution. In 4 Living Labs and 3 Demonstrators more than 20 CIs and first responders, national authorities will participate creating a critical mass for adoption and providing evidence of what is working well, and which components provide clear advantages.
The overall project’s technical objective is to establish an Ecosystem Platform for connecting stakeholders of interdependent CIs and Emergency Services to collaboratively and efficiently manage security and resilience by sharing data, CI Protection models and related new resilience services encapsulated in DTs. In connection with the DTs, the Serious Game approach in PRECINCT will provide a means of identifying vulnerabilities as well as testing and validating new detection and mitigation models and associated services in a real-time real-life context.