Situation awareness in critical infrastructures

Critical infrastructure (CI) protection and situation awareness are relevant topics in critical system domain. These issues go far beyond the academic world involving very often the national security framework. In this contribution, a review of the most attractive approaches proposed for addressing the situation awareness problems is presented. Most of the proposed approaches are based on multi-sensor data fusion, since the awareness is achieved by building a scenario using data provided by sensors spread into the systems. Humans are supposed to interact with the system, but only a few models are able to include their intervention. The review analysis is performed by considering models, architectures, and techniques adopted in each system and by highlighting their effectiveness and drawbacks. Finally an example in the field of air traffic management is presented. © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.