Protecting Australia’s critical infrastructure with CIPMA
Technology for modelling and analysing relationships and dependencies between Australia’s critical infrastructure systems is being built by the Attorney-General’s Department, CSIRO and Geoscience Australia.
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10 December 2007 | Updated 14 October 2011
The Australian Government’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Modelling and Analysis Program (CIPMA) aims to enhance the protection of Australia’s critical infrastructure, and improve the resilience of our economy and society.
CIPMA is a major national security initiative.
Partners
The Australian Federal Government's Attorney-General’s Department initiated and manages the CIPMA Program.
Geoscience Australia and CSIRO work closely together to construct its technical components.
CIPMA supports the work of the Trusted Information Sharing Network for Critical Infrastructure Protection (TISN).
Australian Government agencies, state and territory governments, the Infrastructure Assurance Advisory Groups of the TISN and critical infrastructure owners and operators all play key roles in the program, especially in providing information, data and expert knowledge on the operation of critical infrastructure networks.
Goals
CIPMA’s goal is to give Australia the capability to model and report on the likely impacts when networks in one or more sectors are affected by failures (caused by nature or people) in another sector.
The CIPMA capability is a unique collaboration between government and industry
Sectors covered to date include:
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energy
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telecommunications
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banking and finance.
The capability includes a series of ‘impact models’ designed to assess the flow-on effects of a critical infrastructure service disruption. Assessments include:
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how the economy and population will be affected
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how long the disruption is likely to last
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the area affected and
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how the various infrastructure systems will behave.
This provides valuable information to government and service providers, strengthening national security and better protecting our critical infrastructure.
Integrated modelling and database suite
CIPMA comprises a unique combination of infrastructure sector simulation models, databases, geospatial information systems (GIS) and economic models.
Sector simulation models capture key components, connectivities and operational behaviours for networks in each sector.
They can be run:
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stand-alone, to model their own system operation,
or
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together, to study the impact in one sector of network failure in another, for example, to report how a bank’s interstate data transfers may be affected by failure of a telecommunication link.
Supporting the models are databases containing important attribute data about key infrastructure assets.
GIS systems link the databases and the models and provide map-based displays of model output results.
The whole system provides a powerful and flexible tool for modelling, analysing and reporting on network failures helping:
CSIRO is developing the system-dynamic network simulation models for the various sectors.
Geoscience Australia is building the:
Together, the two organisations are building the integrating software to connect all these components.
CIPMA was declared ‘open for business’ by the then Attorney-General, Mr Phillip Ruddock, in October 2007.
He described CIPMA as 'a unique collaboration between government and industry'.
Learn more about CSIRO’s work in Risk management and decision support overview.
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