Title: Spatial criticality - identifying CIP hot-spots for German regional planning

Authors: Christoph Riegel

Addresses: Institute of Urban and Transport Planning, RWTH Aachen University, Mies-van-der-Rohe-Str. 1, 52056 Aachen, Germany

Abstract: Current strategies for infrastructure resilience in the past often focused on sector specific risk assessment and management activities. But from the regional development planner's perspective, infrastructure sites and corridors like highways, rail tracks, transmission lines and water or gas pipelines cannot be considered as separate and independent from their environment. As damage of infrastructure components may have cascading effects, mutual influences resulting from proximity, intersections and interconnections to other infrastructures have to be considered. The proposed methodology analyses the density of infrastructures in relation to their cross-sectoral and accumulative relevance using geospatial data samples from Germany. It maps spatial criticality by defining a proximity factor which is multiplied with an indicator representing the prominence of each component. This allows the identification of hot-spots of highly accumulated critical infrastructures in a spatial (or geographical) context.

Keywords: critical infrastructures; regional planning; spatial criticality; cross-sectoral; GIS; geographic information systems; infrastructure resilience; CIP hot-spots; Critical infrastructure protection; Germany; regional development.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIS.2015.072157

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2015 Vol.11 No.3, pp.265 - 277

Received: 26 Jul 2013
Accepted: 16 May 2014
Published online: 02 Oct 2015 *

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