The National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC) is a Congressionally-mandated source of expertise on critical infrastructure interdependencies and the consequences of disruption. It is the Nation’s premiere intradepartmental and interagency modeling, simulation, and analysis center, providing support for mitigation and policy planning.
The NISAC team includes management and outreach personnel in Washington, DC, and analytical staff at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. This program integrates the two laboratories’ expertise in the modeling and simulation of complex systems for evaluating national preparedness and security issues. The center operates under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Infrastructure Protection (IP), Infrastructure Analysis and Strategy Division (IASD). To ensure consistency with IP priorities, NISAC initiatives and tasking requests are coordinated through the NISAC program office.
NISAC provides strategic, multi-disciplinary analyses of interdependencies and the consequences of infrastructure disruptions across all 17 critical infrastructure and key resource (CIKR) sectors at national, regional, and local levels. NISAC experts have developed and are employing tools to address the complexities of interdependent national infrastructures, including process-based systems dynamics models, mathematical network optimization models, physics-based models of existing infrastructures, and high-fidelity agent-based simulations of systems.
Program Basis
America’s critical infrastructures and key resources (CI/KR) provide the foundation for the nation’s economic vitality, national security, and way of life. They frame citizens’ daily lives and support one of the world’s highest living standards.
The systems, facilities, and functions that comprise these infrastructures are sophisticated, complex, and highly interdependent. They are comprised of physical, human, and cyber assets, and have evolved over time to be economical and efficient systems. The increasing interconnections and complexity of these systems, subject to natural hazards, coupled with the new threat environment, have created the need for a focus on interdependencies and the consequences they propagate.
NISAC’s objective is to support the preparedness and protection of our nation and society by providing analyses of the technical, economic, and national security implications of the loss or disruption of these CI/KR, and assist in the understanding of infrastructure protection, mitigation, response, and recovery options.
To do this, we must first understand the infrastructures’ performance under unusual conditions, the effects of interdependencies, and the dynamics of their interconnections. To better understand the complexities of the interconnected infrastructures, we collaborate with private sector infrastructure experts to develop methodologies and tools for characterizing and simulating their performance.
NISAC provides multi-disciplinary consequence analyses of infrastructure disruptions in support of risk informed decision making for DHS and the nation. These analyses are often driven by rapidly unfolding events (e.g., hurricanes, malevolent threats) and are needed quickly. The NISAC modeling and analysis tools are essential to providing a broad set of infrastructure disruption analyses with rapid turn-around times.
The complexities of modeling interdependent, national infrastructures are significant. NISAC is developing a wide range of modeling capabilities, illustrated below, that can be used alone or integrated in combination. These models include process-based system dynamics models depicting the demand-driven, capacity-limited production and delivery, mathematical network optimization models, physics-based models of existing infrastructures, and high-fidelity agent-based simulations of systems of individual elements and decision makers, and their performance and behaviors.
Recognized as a valuable national resource by the National Academies of Science in their report “Making the Nation Safer,” and also in the National Infrastructure Protection Plan, NISAC entered the public eye following the White House’s 2006 report “The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned,” which calls for an expanded role for NISAC in three of its recommendations.
To better meet OIP’s goals in FY07, NISAC is expanding outreach to the Sector Specific Agencies (SSAs), providing baseline coverage for all 17 infrastructures, and national priorities analyses including Tier 1 and Tier 2 asset assessments.
