A Serious Game Conceptual Approach to Protect Critical Infrastructure Resilience in Smart Cities

Smart cities have become the most popular concept to manage assets and resources in the growing urban environment. To achieve sustainable city development in smart cities, it is imperative that smart development combined with sustainable practices should be integrated within infrastructure management frameworks. To improve resilience, it is essential to understand the interdependencies and cascading effects of Critical Infrastructures (CIs) subjected to cyber-physical threats. As a result of multiple influencing factors as well as the complex mechanisms in the interconnected smart systems of infrastructures, resilience assessment is highly challenging. To facilitate a deeper understanding of the influence of interdependent infrastructures, this paper proposes a novel serious gaming approach. This approach will incorporate the interdependent and cascading effects of infrastructures to improve the resilience scores. It also aids in improved infrastructure preparations to respond to cyber-physical threats with an 'educational' purpose through the mining of data from gameplay records. The serious game concept presented in this paper is being developed as part of the Horizon 2020-funded PRECINCT project (www.precinct.info).