Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) is getting increased attention as a result of the number of man-made threats (terrorism, malicious attacks, cyber events) and natural disasters. In addition to that, critical infrastructure systems are becoming more and more interconnected with the introduction of ICT technologies and thus isolated events may lead to large-scale or even continent wide disruptions. Interdependencies between critical systems are a key factor that needs to be considered in the framework of their analysis and simulation with the objective to improve their resilience. This is not simply an EU approach but also in the US, the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Centre (NISAC) has developed a number of tools for the analysis of critical infrastructure systems, supply chains, etc. which obviously are tailored to the US reality. In Europe, most tools are developed responding to national efforts and focus on the specific issues that need to be addressed at national scale. Obviously this approach shows its limitations in case large-scale infrastructures that expand across borders and jurisdictions need to be assessed. Data sharing concerns are a major issue in the field of critical infrastructures analysis and this is a factor that somehow hinders the development of shared tools and methodologies for the analysis and simulation. Collaboration among CI stakeholders is indeed an open issue in the framework of CI analysis and simulation. In order to foster collaborative analysis, it is important to make sure that all stakeholders agree on a common terminology and to provide tools that enable collaboration while ensuring data security and privacy through the whole analysis cycle. Critical infrastructure owners and operators have agreed on several occasions the importance of developing tools and methodologies for modelling and simulation. It is true that in the recent years, several tools have been developed and these can be used for the assessment of a wide number of disruptive scenarios. It seems though that most of such tools lack the features to be used at a European scale and therefore fail to become standards. In principle, they represent ad-hoc efforts tailored to the needs of a particular region/state/sector. Consequently, often they lack the capability to scale up to international level. In response to the above-mentioned issues, JRC developed the Geospatial Risk and Resilience Assessment Platform (GRRASP). GRRASP is a World Wide Web oriented architecture bringing together geospatial technologies and computational tools for the analysis and simulation of critical infrastructures. It allows information sharing and constitutes a basis for future developments in the direction of collaborative analysis and federated simulation. It takes on board security concerns in the information sharing process, thanks to its ability to manage users and roles consistently. Based entirely on open source technologies, the system can also be deployed in separate servers and used by EU Member States as a means to facilitate the analysis of risk and resilience in critical infrastructures. The current version of the GRRASP architecture represents an important improvement over the previous versions. The technical infrastructure of the project has benefited from the integration with the Drupal Content Management Systems (CMS), which streamlines the development and update process of the platform and allows the integration with a number of third-part modules, fostering interoperability and bringing collaboration capabilities to a new level. Thanks to these features, the platform seems to properly meet the objective to provide an analysis framework that can be used by member states competent authorities and operators in order to improve risk and resilience assessment at local, regional, national and international scale. In addition, it can represent a tool to support the development and testing process of new models, as well as CIP-related training activities.
