Identifying Critical Components in Large Scale Cyber Physical Systems

The problem of identifying critical components in large scale networked Cyber-Physical Systems comes up as an underlying issue when attempting to enhance the efficiency, the safety and the security of such systems. Graph theory is one of the well-studied methods that are often used to model complex systems and to facilitate the analysis of network-based features of systems to identify critical components. However, recent studies mainly focus on identifying influential nodes in a system and neglect the importance of links. In this paper, we heed to the identification of both key links and nodes in a system, and we aggregate the result by leveraging the multi-variable synthetic evaluation and multiple-criteria decision-making M-TOPSIS method to rank the system components based on their importance.