Innovation - Rethink your system

Proactive risk management calls for prevention and preparedness, through structured multidisciplinary approaches, capable of offering the required risk-relevant context. In addition, as the resilience of water systems is emerging in policy discourse and strategic planning, it is imperative to rethink water systems as cyber-physical systems in a resilience-oriented way.

In its core, PROCRUSTES provides a synthesis of novel concepts and methodologies to assess risk in cyber-physical water systems. Utilizing the enhanced capabilities offered, the project moves towards a novel risk management framework to tackle cyber-physical threats, strengthen the capacities of water utilities to protect their systems, determine gaps and improve risk management approaches and technologies.

PROCRUSTES solutions will help you:

  • Gain a clearer understanding of the system’s strengths and vulnerabilities
  • Investigate promising interventions and countermeasures and stress test them against alternative futures
  • Detect “black swan” scenarios – low probability high impact
  • Quantify costs and benefits to develop resilient and sustainable strategies

Scientific methodology and novel aspects

Agent Based Models for assessing risk in cyber-physical systems



The proposed methodology to quantify cyber-physical risks for critical water infrastructures aims to take advantage of the ability of Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) approaches to describe systems of complex adaptive nature that characterize behavioural (e.g. choice of target), socio-technical systems (e.g. water systems including human stakeholders) and their “real-world” interaction.

Agent Based Models for assessing risk in cyber-physical systems

Intuitive Scenario Planning environment



The Scenario Planning environment streamlines the process of identifying threats, exploring cascade effects and characterizing cyber and physical risks while also automatically shapes them into suitable structures for the what-if investigation of complex system behaviour under multiple threats scenarios.

Multi-objective optimisation



The PROCRUSTES flexible optimization platform will integrate advanced multi-objective algorithms capable of assisting key processes such as the system calibration, uncertainty propagation analysis and criticality prioritization from a combination of threats.

Multi-objective optimisation

Key Performance Indicators



PROCRUSTES provides a common yet adaptable analysis basis to quantify the loss of performance against multiple dimensions, allowing to assess the criticality of assets, account for the disruption of service to critical customers (e.g. hospitals, schools, government, first responders) and consider the system survival time after an incident based on dynamic parameters.

Stress-Testing Platform



The Stress-Testing Platform relies on a sophisticated architecture that advances the state-of-art through the elaboration of an integrated risk assessment system capable of combining models and tools together from different scientific fields and aids to our understanding of the behaviour of combined cyber-physical systems, building on systems thinking and hydro-informatics for a more resilient water sector.

Stress-Testing Platform

Risk Reduction Knowledge Base



The expandable risk reduction knowledge-base (RRKB) allows for the ad-hoc exploration from an observed problem to the screening of alternative interventions worth considering through the encapsulated actions, activities or processes which can be applied to reduce the occurrence and minimize consequences of specified relevant events.

Integrated Risk Assessment and Treatment Framework



The integrated Risk Assessment and Treatment framework, is the final product of PROCRUSTES and is designed to serve as an all-in-one solution that aids risk management and strategic planning in cyber-wise water utilities in that it allows for a holistic investigation of the topic through dynamic synergies between the state-of-art tools and methodologies.

Integrated Risk Assessment and Treatment Framework