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.