National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC)

The National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC) is CISA’s research and development arm for risk analysis. NISAC is focused on building advanced analytic tools that put comprehensive, quantitative, and actionable information in the hands of users. These tools expand our understanding of how to manage risks to the Nation’s critical infrastructure. Making impactful investments across a diverse group of federal research centers, NISAC brings analytic solutions to the critical infrastructure community and addresses emerging risks across sectors.

Overview

Beginning as a collaboration between Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories in 1999, NISAC was incorporated by the USA Patriot Act of 2001 into the Department of Homeland Security in March 2003.

Today, NISAC is managed by CISA’s National Risk Management Center (NRMC) and collaborates with centers of innovation, including National Laboratories, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC), and the private sector. Together, they work to mature NRMC’s risk analysis capabilities, developing datasets, methodologies, and analytic tools that empower critical infrastructure decision makers with actionable and forward-looking information.

NISAC manages projects that create solutions for the analytic requirements across the critical infrastructure community. This multidisciplinary approach covers the full spectrum of the 55 National Critical Functions (NCF) and 16 critical infrastructure sectors while focusing on the challenges posed by interdependencies across the NCFs and the consequences of a disruption from various threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities.

NISAC Analytic Development Priorities 

Significant potential events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, pandemics and cyber-attacks do not follow jurisdictional boundaries, consequently impactful and robust risk analysis is vital to public and private sector decision makers as they prepare for and respond to events that impact CI. In order to make transformative change to critical infrastructure risk analysis, NISAC focuses research and development efforts on interdependent, cross-discipline, and cross-jurisdictional analytic capabilities and specializes in the buildout of long-term, predictive, analytic capabilities.

Strategic Focus Areas include: 

Operational Response 

NISAC develops analytic capabilities to support the U.S. Government’s crisis action activities and the coordination of cross-sector emergency response operations, including dependency analysis, threat and hazard simulations, and infrastructure modeling. While NISAC’s robust portfolio of capabilities can be leveraged for crisis action analysis, many of these tools are designed to be “dual use” to also provide insights during steady-state operations, and in support of other strategic risk analysis.

Emerging Risks

Investments in analytic research and development is a strategic focus area for NISAC, prioritizing the identification of future and emerging risks, and driving development of tools and capabilities to support CI stakeholders prepare for and respond to those new threats. NISAC works across the NRMC and CISA to expand risk analysis capabilities and methodologies to guide decision makers as they respond to systemic and emerging risks to CI. NISAC leverages future foresight capabilities to drive long-term planning and investments to put new and enhanced capabilities in the hands of CISA analysts to respond to the CI risks of the future.

Suite of Tools for the Analysis of Risk (STAR) and Risk Analysis: Methods, Models, Data, and Support 

NISAC is building an engine of standard analytic tools and reproducible processes – the Suite of Tools for the Analysis of Risk (STAR) that:

• Broadens  critical infrastructure understanding by adding a functional context to risk analysis  
• Identifies risk scenarios
• Standardizes individual models and data for integrated analysis across the risk matrix of consequence, threat, and vulnerability analysis
• Generates standard outputs and visualizations for risk analysis that communicate clear results

NISAC is establishing the analytic methodology behind the tool, as well as building out the underlying data and predictive modeling. STAR integrates the innovative National Critical Functions (NCF) dataset to provide a holistic view of critical infrastructure and find connections and dependencies looking at all relationships within and across critical infrastructure functions, sectors, and assets. The expanded perspective allows leadership to make risk-informed decisions that include cross-cutting or cross sector risks, emerging risks, and functional dependencies. As STAR continues to develop, this capability will provide new, actionable risk analysis to homeland security and critical infrastructure decision makers.