TOWARDS RISK ASSESSMENT OF CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES: EXPERIENCES GAINED FROM QUASI REAL-TIME VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT OF THE TRANSPORTATION OF DANGEROUS SUBSTANCES BY ROAD

Past and recent terrorist attacks have put into question the vulnerability of our society to the terrorist threat. The European citizen has questioned the ability of the Institutions to ensure an adequate and balanced level of security over the territory. In October 2004, the European Commission, prompted by the European Council and an increasing public concern over security, issued a communication on “Critical Infrastructure Protection in the Fight against Terrorism” to undertake a challenging European Programme to Protect Critical Infrastructures (EPCIP) and other European key assets against the threat posed by terrorism and other negative intentional acts, in close cooperation with Member States and other stakeholders. But as not all infrastructures can be protected from all threats, harmonized methods, inspired by risk management techniques, are needed to address, in a single comprehensive security management model, the existing and emerging threats to critical infrastructures, their vulnerability and criticality, and the defence layers and other cost-effective protective measures that can be implemented. Notably, the Transport sector as one category of Critical Infrastructures, has been repeatedly the target of terrorist actions. Consequently, Transport has to guarantee an elevated level of protection and security. It is especially important in the case of the transport of dangerous substances, where the nature of the shipment can be exploited by terrorists to disrupt or destroy other targets. As a consequence there is a need to carry out the research at different scales, which has an impact on the analysis of risks, on the vulnerability assessment and on the prioritization of strategies of risk management. Methods and associated enabling technologies need to be reviewed, compared and further developed, integrated and harmonized. Considering this background, this paper presents results of the research that aim to exploit the data gained by a pilot-system for the quasi real-time monitoring of the transport of hazardous substances by road in Italy. The hardware architecture of the system and the preliminary results have already be presented at VGR 2004 The pilot-system consists of 140 on-board units installed either on a tractor or a tanker, of a national service and communication center, of three local operational centers and of end-user terminals. Depending on the configuration of the pair tractor-tanker, the transmitted information includes pre-defined warning and alarm messages from/to the driver, location of the truck, opening/closing operations of the access lid to the inlet/outlet valves, and data from the electronic controller of these valves (thereby responding to the specification on telemetry of the Security Provisions [§1.10] of the ADR 2005 regulation). This paper focuses on the adopted approach, starting from the analysis of the information that is available, to the determination of pertinent methods for risk analysis of dangerous substance transport. We will show how the monitoring system improves the accuracy of both the risk analysis and the scenario identification. In real time the movement and status of the hazardous substances can be monitored precisely over space, and alarms with information as to where, what type of tanker, what substances, and their quantity, can be timely signaled directly to the correct institutional authorities for emergency management. Additionally, in order to provide a better understanding of the overall spatial and temporal distribution of the dangerous substances, the real time data needed to be interpreted with appropriate dimensions. The determination of the significance of such dimensions was achieved through the off-line data analysis through route re-construction that included the analysis of each significant operation during the journey. In combination with additional territorial information such as population, associated critical infrastructures or other po...