Cross-border Information Sharing for Critical Infrastructure Resilience: Requirements and Platform Architecture

Resilience of Critical Infrastructures (CI) is high on the agenda of countries’ efforts. Modern CI are highly interdependent and span countries, so disruptions occurring on one side of the border can significantly affect economic and social functions on the other. To build CI resilience, stakeholder organizations must collaborate and exchange information throughout the Emergency Management (EM) cycle. In this paper, we present the Critical Infrastructure Platform (PIC in Italian). PIC is a technological piece of a broader cross-border regional resilience strategy between Lombardy Region (Italy) and Canton Ticino (Switzerland) aiming to improve the capacity to manage accidental events involving transportation CI between the two countries. The main goal of the PIC platform is to support secure and effective information-sharing, inter-organizational risk assessment, monitoring and operational coordination under critical situations. The paper presents the key requirements of such ICT system, its high-level architecture including the description of its main modules, main takeaways and future steps.