Infrastructure Risk and Resilience: Transportation
Infrastructure Risk and Resilience: Transportation
In an increasingly integrated transport environment, failure or loss of individual components can have a significant impact on the operation of the overall network. There is an increasing reliance on a dependable and robust transport network, supporting extended supply chains, just in time delivery of high value and perishable items, gas imports and commuters to our cities. Over half the world's population now live in these cities where a functioning, integrated transport system are essential. These systems are under constant threat from a variety of areas. As these systems integrate, there is now a real risk that a system failure will have a disproportionate impact in the system of systems. The threats are identifiable broadly as natural or environmental threats like volcanic ash on aviation, high power winds like tornadoes, tidal surges resulting flooded transport hubs and malicious attack with intent to disrupt modern transport systems. The IET remains firmly interested in the engineering techniques and approaches to the protection of assets in terms of reliable systems design, identification of failure modes and single points of failure. Furthermore, the processes for combating malicious attack and reducing impact of human/operator error and the methodology for assessing environmental impact on assets. This publication, which is intended to be the start of a series of publications looking at the protection of a number of infrastructure categories, goes some way into looking at how these threats are being studied in the transport sector.
Inspec keywords: game theory; railways; security; risk management; emergency management; knowledge management; transportation; network theory (graphs)
Other keywords: transport security; tunnel ventilation analysis; game theory; transport knowledge transfer network; infrastructure risk; infrastructure resilience; transportation; English railway station security; network theory; crisis; resource management; response situation
Subjects: Information management; Transportation industry; General topics in manufacturing and production engineering; Security aspects; Combinatorial mathematics; Management issues
Critical infrastructures important to society are at risk from natural hazards and man-made events, ranging from climate change to terrorism. The awareness of the potential consequences in socio-economic terms of losing the functionality and availability of this infrastructure has grown in the past two decades. The result has been considerable research effort into understanding our infrastructure systems, how they are interconnected and the levels of risk that exist from the variety of hazards they face. A significant number of infrastructure related risk and resilience policies, plans and supporting methods of analysis and assessment have been produced. This paper reviews current thinking regarding risk and resilience of infrastructure, and in particular that of transportation systems. The aim is to illustrate the key concepts, identify developments and signpost sources of suitable information.
Although the EU has implemented some legislation on the security of transport infrastructure in Europe (i.e. EPCIP Directive 2008/114/), the security of transport networks up to date remains a national prerogative. While research has been conducted on a European scale, operative measures are implemented only on the national level. This paper argues for an Europeanisation of transport security, focussing on practicable recommendations for achieving this goal. Additionally, the divergence between a nationally shaped risk perception and the cross-boundary nature of security threats is discussed and possible strategies to overcome this problem are outlined. Furthermore, the paper aims at fostering the debate between (transport) security stakeholders in the EU Member States and presenting incentives and arguments for a shift from a national to a European security rationale.
This paper provides an accessible introduction to the application of basic concepts from network theory and game theory to identify critical elements of networks. Simple examples are used to illustrate the application of these methods in the analysis of transport networks and to discuss the interpretation of the results.
The Cabinet Office definition of Resilience is the, '...ability of the community, services, area or infrastructure to detect, prevent, and if necessary to withstand, handle and recover from disruptive challenges'. In any large enterprise, response to an emergency will inevitably involve a planned reaction by several different elements of that enterprise and by other agencies outside the enterprise. In the rail industry, for example, response to an extreme weather incident could easily involve more than a dozen different organisational actors. The plans that are invoked when an event occurs are usually detailed and complex. Most large organisations spend significant time and effort in developing these plans and in training for when they are needed. Multiagency training and exercising are vital tools in ensuring that plans are co-ordinated. However, it is almost impossible to develop plans with perfect coherence. There is strong evidence from a variety of domains to suggest that crucial dependencies between the various plans relevant to emergency response only come to light when an incident occurs. This article explores the difficulty of identifying, mapping and managing critical dependencies between planned responses through the scenario of a multi-agency response to an extreme weather event with emphasis on the rail sector, and examines how dependency management can help to optimise the response.
During the next decade, railway stations in England will be impacted by the billions of pounds being invested in current projects such as High Speed 2, Cross Rail and new refurbishment schemes to modernise and develop rail infrastructure. Railway stations are highly networked and open locations that are often crowded, which makes them particularly vulnerable to security threats. Hence, there is a clear need to identify the range of stakeholders and policies that influence the resilience of railway stations to security threats, and to understand the challenges that are inherent in addressing the legislative and operational requirements of their design. As part of an on-going research project, a state-of-the-art literature review, stakeholder analysis and mapping and interviews with key stakeholders have established critical implications for the future resilience of railway stations. Findings reveal that there is a multiplicity of stakeholders responsible for the complex operational and legal frameworks affecting major railway stations. Regardless of the interdependencies between stakeholders and their intersecting individual operational regulations and legislative requirements, there is a distinct lack of a coherent consistent and collective approach to resilience, with issues being dealt with by separate stakeholders and policies. This paper provides a current and innovative contribution to aid the understanding of the complex and interconnected forms of relationships which exemplify the station. The diverse range of stakeholders will gain an increased knowledge and appreciation of the necessity for a collaborative and integrated strategy, which is essential in both addressing the design and operation of the railway station. The findings advocate changes in institutional practices, so these interconnections are addressed now to ensure the effective assimilation of strategies are cohesive and which safeguard the resilience of railway stations for future generations.
Resilience is a characteristic of an operation and distinct from Protection, which pertains to assets. It is achieved through demand and dependency management to limit consequence of a catastrophic event, and so provide an assurance of operational continuity. When one analyses an operation's dependencies in context, it is possible to avoid the boundary conditions that arise between different system networks when they are analysed spatially, as assets. This necessitates a cyber, human and temporal as well as spatial definition of infrastructure. The recent City of Toronto Infrastructure Resilience Study successfully mapped the dependencies of the City operation, demonstrating a scalable application of resilience planning to a large scale complex operation. However, it also raised new questions that directly affect the City's ability to function during and recovery quickly from a catastrophic event. Demand clusters represent some degree of dependency, which can become critical during an emergency and impede even paralyse the City's ability to recover. The communities where these critical dependencies arise would seem to exhibit an imbalance in focus, ownership and infrastructure. Furthermore, an initial investigation of communities that survived catastrophic events clearly demonstrates a coincidence of these traits within a strategic framework and a consenting leadership dynamic between the communities and their higher authorities. This paper proposes a theory on community resilience that is based upon established resilience planning practice and the observed coincident traits in resilient communities, offering a way of potentially stimulating community resilience in the future.
In view of a number of fundamental weaknesses in the existing railway industry practice for selecting effective risk-reduction measures, this paper proposes a new decision support approach based on sound, comprehensive and structured engineering principles from which risk-reduction measures are identified. The proposed new approach is based on assessing the amount of risk the risk-reduction measures remove and their cost and on selecting the combination of risk-reduction measures which removes the largest amount of risk within the specified budget. We show that this approach is superior to the traditional cost-benefit-analysis approach, based on prioritising the risks according to their cost-benefit ratio and selecting only risk-reduction measures with benefit-cost ratio greater than one.
Managing its civil and national security risk is one of the greater challenges facing any government. Since 2010, the UK Government has made great strides to firm up the way it predicts and manages these risks. The Bow Group, on the other hand, feels there is a great deal more it can be doing. The government should embrace modern qualitative and quantitative methods of risk management, as it is only with robust governance structures and cutting-edge risk management solutions created by modern enterprise that the government can begin to effectively cope with that elusive beast, the black swan.
Understanding and being able to predict the aerodynamic and thermodynamic behaviour in transit tunnels is vital for two reasons. It promotes the reduction of the risks or consequences of accidents and deliberate acts of terrorism; and increases resilience by aiding the provision of reasonable thermal comfort within an infrastructure which uses increasingly energy intensive train systems and operations against a backdrop of increasing ambient temperatures. This paper shows how, with a detailed understanding of the system's energy balance, the engineer can use a combination of one-dimensional and three-dimensional thermal and airflow analysis techniques, along with passenger evacuation modelling, to optimise the design of the system. The subject is vast however and so this paper can only briefly introduce each topic. The principles introduced are also applicable to other infrastructure such as road and cable tunnels, car parks, buildings and stadia.
The UK is becoming increasingly vulnerable to changes in weather extremes as a result of climate change. In response to the current and projected climate impacts, actions are required to manage this increasing vulnerability in the form of climate change adaptation. Capacity building actions are a fundamental foundation of delivering adaptation actions. This paper will explore the current capacity for the transport sector to address climate change adaptation, highlight gaps in training that need to be addressed, and make recommendations to help address these.
