Co-Simulation
CISCS: Socio-Technical Co-Simulator for Infrastructure Interdependencies and Community Resilience
Critical Interdependent Infrastructure Systems Co-Simulator links domain simulators with community assets so infrastructure disruptions can be studied as coupled technical and social consequences.
Why CISCS
Critical infrastructure systems do not fail in isolation. Power outages can affect pumps, water pressure, wastewater and stormwater operations, transportation access, hospitals, schools, residential buildings, and other community services. CISCS was developed to study these linked disruptions in one socio-technical simulation environment rather than treating each infrastructure domain as a separate model.
Architecture
The framework synchronizes multiple domain simulators in a shared global clock, including MATPOWER and OpenDSS for electric power, EPANET and WNTR for drinking water, SWMM and PySWMM for stormwater and wastewater, Path4GMNS for transportation, and community asset models. A unified model hierarchy, standardized geospatial references, and scenario files allow the simulators to exchange state information while preserving the domain logic of each tool.
CISCS links infrastructure state changes to community-level consequences, helping resilience analysis move beyond isolated technical performance.
Socio-Technical Coupling
A central contribution of CISCS is bidirectional coupling between infrastructure states and community asset states. Infrastructure failures are mapped to hospitals, schools, residences, essential services, and other community assets, while community resource requirements and service generation can be represented as demands or impacts in the infrastructure models. This makes the simulation output useful for interpreting who is affected, what services are degraded, and where resilience interventions may matter.
Hazards and Cascading Effects
CISCS includes weather event and asset-damage modules that can apply hazard intensity, fragility curves, and rule-based interdependencies at each simulation step. For example, a wind-induced line outage can propagate through the power simulator, affect a pump or service location, and then influence water, stormwater, wastewater, transportation, or community service outcomes.
What It Enables
CISCS supports multi-infrastructure scenarios such as transmission and distribution outages, coupled power-stormwater disruptions, water-quality impacts, and high-wind disaster analysis. The goal is to connect technical system states with affected populations, metered locations, accessibility, and resilience metrics so the research can inform planning, mitigation, and recovery decisions.
My Role
I contribute to the co-simulation architecture, domain model integration workflows, GIS-enabled data preparation, cascading-impact analysis, and resilience interpretation methods that connect simulator outputs to stakeholder-facing decision-support questions.