This paper describes a knowledge-based system (KBS) designed to support a federated environment for simulating critical infrastructure models. A federation of simulators is essentially a "system of systems," where each simulator represents an entity that operates independently with its own behavior and purpose. The interactions among the components of the federated system of systems exhibit critical infrastructure vulnerabilities as emergent behavior; these vulnerabilities cannot be analyzed and simulated by considering the behavior of each system component individually. The KBS, which is based on ontologies and rules, provides a semantic foundation for the federated simulation environment and enables the dynamic binding of different critical infrastructure models. The KBS-based simulation environment can be used to identify latent critical infrastructure interdependencies and to test assumptions about interdependencies.

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This paper presents a Knowledge Base System (KBS) as a key component of a federated sim- ulation framework aimed at investigating the dependencies among Critical Infrastructures (CIs). The KBS, based on the ontological formalism, represents the properties and the relations of each simulation domain and the dependency relations among different domains. Some auxiliary data structures, necessary to model the interaction among the simulators of different CIs, have been defined and have been populated through suitable queries to the KBS. The adoption of the onto- logical formalism allowed the definition of a common formalism to deal with the heterogeneity arising from the presence of different domains

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