Interactive Visualization of Interdependencies and Vulnerabilities in Constrained Environments

Many critical infrastructure assets from hospitals to industrial facilities rely on multiple infrastructure services whose close proximity can result in the failure of one component causing cascading failures in other assets. This effective analysis and mitigation of risks requires the consideration of numerous scenarios and input from domain experts.
This paper describes a distributed interactive visualization and analysis mechanism for constrained environments such as buildings and industrial facilities in which the physical and logical components and dependencies are considered in a three-dimensional model. Physical effects modeled include flooding, fire, smoke and gas explosions; the logical dependencies considered include telecommunications and electrical power. This allows the creation of scenarios by interactively creating events whose effects are subsequently captured by physical and logical sub-models that can be viewed and replayed from multiple angles to permit efficient analysis and review. The capabilities of the system are illustrated using a complex scenario of cascading physical and logical failures resulting from a water leakage in a hospital environment.