A risk and resilience assessment approach for railway networks

Railway transportation dynamically performs under complex coherent systems and fail-safe interlocking conditions. Security and safety are the first priorities of this massive intermodal transportation. However, railway systems, like any other critical infrastructure, face many threats that can take not only the form of physical, but may also be cyber or combined cyber-physical threats, since the automated and digital-based technologies in the rail operation may be vulnerable. Therefore, SAFETY4RAILS (S4R), a H2020 EU project, was initiated to strengthen the EU rail operations by increasing the resilience and improving the safety and security of railway and metro networks against these threat types through the further development and combination of a variety of state-of-the-art tools, most of which start with a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of around 5. Within S4R, many tools will be utilized including a predictive risk and resilience assessment tool, an anomaly detection tool and an asset management tool. To achieve effective tool development and integration, the project requires huge collaboration from different expert and informative sources. This paper will include a discussion on risk and resilience assessment specific to rail systems, including a section on hardware-based countermeasures, before focusing on the risk assessment tool and how it will be implemented. The paper will also introduce a few other tools within the project and discuss the expected interactions the predictive risk assessment tool will have.