Visualization of critical infrastructure resilience using TreeMap

Abstract

The resilience of modern societies is to a large degree determined by the resilience of their Critical Infrastructures (CI). These infrastructures are critical because interruptions not only influence the infrastructures themselves, but loss of functionality has secondary effects on the society. The use of smart technologies makes these “Smart” Cis (i.e. SCIs) increasingly interdependent and vulnerable to various hazards, such as terror attacks, cyber-attacks and extreme weather. The EU H2020 research project SmartResilience has developed a baseline critical infrastructure resilience assessment method, which measures the level of resilience through resilience indicators selected by the user of the SCI in question. This paper focuses on an innovative methodology developed for interactively visualizing the critical infrastructure resilience level using TreeMap. Visualization is the preferred way for users to access complex data and is considered as an enabler for reasoning and decision making. In SmartResilience, the interactive visualization methodology focuses on presenting the entire resilience level assessment in a consumable manner. The paper shows how the visualization methodology, using the TreeMap features, enables users to visualize large amount of data and draw conclusions quickly by: (i) having a big picture of the entire resilience status, (ii) identifying indicators with the highest influence on resilience, or comparing and monitoring resilience levels of: (i) the same SCI at different times, or (ii) of multiple SCIs over time.