The MOTIA Project

The MOTIA project has been approved a grant by the European Commission - Directorate-General "Home Affairs": JLS/2009/CIPS/AG/C1-016.

The Project started on April 14-th 2010 and ended up April 13-th 2012 after 24 month activity.

The Motia Final Conference took place in Rome on March 29-th 2012.
Recorded Videos of the different presentations are available at "TV-Area" of the CNR Pisa Research Area.

Information reported here represent a synthesis of the project results.
Deliverables and other documents available for download in the right-side represent assessed results.

MOTIA project is aimed at developing a methodological framework for ICT network inter-dependencies analysis. Special efforts will be devoted to identify critical system inter-dependencies as potential amplifiers of negative impacts upon failures or deliberate attacks.
A representative Italian case study was supposed to be deeply analyzed, whilst providing general purpose tools.
Generally speaking, one expects increases of inter-dependency among the different systems to reduce resilience of the overall system. Redundancy and Robustness analysis of the system, together with vulnerabilities search represent a significant part of the whole project activity.
The analysis of indicators may also help CERT's (Computer Emergency Response Teams) to take prompt and effective actions in order to recover an acceptable operational state. However, our attempts to draw CERT's attention on the subject were not fruitful.

Among related objectives the following are worth noting:

  • Provide a methodology to translate "native language" description of service into modeling languages such as UML (Universal Model Language), that is suggest a methodology to attain a conceptualization of ICT based services.
  • Provide a means to model and simulate ICT systems to attain decision support systems or other Agent-based analysis tools.
  • Developing analytical tools capable to identify the most critical inter-dependencies.
    Basic screenings will be in terms of potential impact on Quality of Service that relate to security perception and economic loss, and eventual indirect casualties (as requested by European Commission general indications),
  • Ensuring the analysis methodologies to account for emerging technologies, forthcoming operators and growth trends.
  • Analyzing the significant End Users' perspective, to understand their dependence on ICT infrastructures and to suggest possible improvements.