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Top1. Introduction
During the latter decade, the literature on critical infrastructure has emphasized that more awareness should be put on digital vulnerabilities, and expressed a need to educate professionals and citizens on these matters, enabling for a society to become more resilient to disturbances in digital infrastructures and the functions dependent on these (Hagen, 2016). Resilience in a society with a high degree of interdependency between the functions of critical infrastructures depends on collaborative responses from the actors involved, who might have diverse backgrounds and differing responsibilities, not familiar with cascade effects into areas beyond and outside their own organisation or sector. In such circumstances, there is a risk that the responses of the individual actors are sub-optimal or counteract each other due to limited understanding of the interdependencies and constraints of other actors (Ansell et al., 2010). Studying escalations and cascading effects is not an easy task, thus there exists very few empirical studies of these matters across many infrastructures, making it difficult to predict necessary interactions between sectors in crisis management, cf., e.g., (Boin, and McConnell, 2007; van Eeten et al., 2011).
Gaming simulation encompass roles to be played by participants of a game where the outcomes or their actions are simulated, and the interactions between the participating “players” and their actions made in order to reach goals are also part of the simulation, see (van Laere et al., 2006). The approach is particularly relevant when studying interactions between the participants, such as deliberative processes on possible actions to take and negotiations about which action to take and how to interpret simulation outcome as a consequence of the action taken. As the participants literally are active participants, and not merely observers, it may facilitate learning of both the context simulated and of other participants’ constraints, see, e.g., (Mayer, 2009).
This paper reports upon a study conducted within a research project aiming to develop a gaming simulation environment that enables for a greater understanding how resilience against disruptions in the payment system is to be improved. For clarity, when referring to the “payment system” we refer to the means by which consumers may initiate a transaction to business in exchange for goods or services, with a focus on food, medicines, and fuel supply. Some attempts towards modelling and simulation of the payment system have been made, primarily focusing on the banking sector. For instance, Galbiati, and Soramäki (2011) constructs a multi-agent system where the agents represents banks, simulating how the banks manage delays and liquidity acquisitions resulting in equilibrium states. With respect to simulation for risk assessment purposes, Bedford et al. (2005) investigates worst-case scenarios as a consequence of the inability of one part to send and receive payments in a large-value context. By constrast, the ultimate purpose of the project is to provide team training to decision-makers in inter-organisational crisis management when the common means for transactions suddenly become limited or non-existing. A number of data collections such as document studies, interviews and workshops with experts from the food, fuel and financial sectors, reveal seven challenges for collective cross-functional critical infrastructure resilience that need to be dealt with: 1) Shortage of food, fuel, cash, medicine; 2) Limited capacity of alternative payment solutions; 3) Cities are more vulnerable than the countryside; 4) Economically vulnerable groups in society are more severely affected; 5) Need to maintain trust and prevent panic; 6) Crisis communication needs; 7) Fragmentation of responsibility for critical infrastructures across many actors. For a detailed description, see (van Laere et al., 2017; Johansson et al., 2017; Johansson et al., 2018).