Societal infrastructures are extremely fragile. A seemingly minor incident like a power transformer failure or an anonymous bomb threat or a road-traffic accident can send an entire system into a catastrophic state that may take months or years to set right again.

Understanding how these infrastructures work, both separately and together, and uncovering ways to design and control these systems so as to be able to carry out their function in the face of unknown, and possibly unknowable, disruptions is one of key challenges facing virtually every country in the industrialized world.

That type of understanding is the goal of IIASA's initiative on the Fragility of Critical Infrastructures.

For further information, please contact John Casti of the Dynamic Systems (DYN) program.