Webinar on Building Infrastructure Resilience through Digital Crisis-Simulation Tools

Background

Critical infrastructures such as energy, communication, transport, finance, and public services are essential to the daily functioning of modern societies. These systems have become increasingly interconnected, combining physical networks with digital technologies to deliver services more efficiently. However, this interdependence also brings new risks. Failure in one area can quickly trigger cascading effects across sectors, causing widespread disruption and compromising public safety. Recent large-scale events have demonstrated the scale of these risks. Take the Iberian Peninsula blackout in 2025. Electric power was interrupted for about ten hours, causing severe difficulties in telecommunications, transportation systems, and essential emergency services, and death of at least seven people in Spain and Portugal.

Webinar focus

The SPARROW project has developed a digital toolkit to support emergency stakeholders at different stages of crises management. In this webinar, we will present three tools for building preventive, responsive and recovery capabilities through data-driven simulations. These tools are:

• CITWIN – a City Digital Twin for dynamic vulnerability assessment and digital breakdown simulation;
• CIS – a critical infrastructure simulator for modelling interdependencies and cascading effects;
• VASE – a vulnerability and recovery assessment engine.

Speakers

Agenda

Tools overview

CITWIN is a City Digital Twin for digital breakdown simulation. It provides a virtual representation of city-scale geographic and critical infrastructure data, including infrastructure interdependencies, and enables operators to modify elements of the simulation according to the decisions and recommendations being considered. These changes can alter the evolution of a scenario and trigger a re-evaluation of infrastructure vulnerability. CITWIN supports situational awareness and the visualization and management of crisis situations.

CIS is a critical infrastructure simulation framework that models hazard impacts, infrastructure interdependencies and cascading effects across interconnected networks. Based on the IRICS framework, it represents physical, cyber and geographic dependencies and simulates how disruptions propagate across power, telecommunications and road networks.

VASE estimates real-time vulnerability by integrating data from interdependency analysis, scenario simulations, and asset-state monitoring of power towers. Beyond vulnerabilities, VASE evaluates the capacity of infrastructure components to recover in the face of adversity. Users can also carry out a socioeconomic evaluation of indirect losses expressed in terms of Gross Value Added, considering the business sector taxonomy of the affected area.