The National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC) is a modeling, simulation, and analysis program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) comprising personnel in the Washington, D.C. area, as well as from Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Congress mandated that NISAC serve as a “source of national expertise to address critical infrastructure protection” research and analysis. NISAC prepares and shares analyses of critical infrastructure, including their interdependencies, vulnerabilities, consequences, and other complexities, under the direction of the Office of Infrastructure Protection (IP), Infrastructure Analysis and Strategy Division (IASD). To ensure consistency with IP priorities, NISAC initiatives and tasking requests are coordinated through the NISAC program office.

NISAC provides strategic, multidisciplinary analyses of interdependencies and the consequences of infrastructure disruptions across all 16 critical infrastructure sectors at national, regional, and local levels. NISAC experts have developed and are employing tools to address the complexities of interdependent national infrastructure, including process-based systems dynamics models, mathematical network optimization models, physics-based models of existing infrastructure, and high-fidelity agent-based simulations of systems.