Solutions to Growing Threats to Transportation and Infrastructure

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Transportation systems are a key target for terrorists. Effective and efficient transportation plays a crucial role not only in the everyday lives of citizens, but also in ensuring the on-going economic wellbeing of communities and countries. Basic things like people’s ability to be able to get to work on time, the transportation of goods in a cost-effective manner, and the efficient use of energy are mandatory functions in today’s world.

This is why disruption to transport, whether intentional or not, can cause damage. As public transport is by its nature open and accessible to everyone, it is susceptible to terrorist attack, as seen all too clearly in the 2005 London bombings and the coordinated attacks on four commuter trains in Madrid in 2004.

Other critical infrastructures such as power grids or water plants are also a growing concern to governments. Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other disasters — both natural and industrial — like the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 underline the fact that risks are not only related to terrorism.

A CORDIS release reports that this is why the EU-funded SECONOMICS project is vital to the long term wellbeing of Europe. By bringing together a multinational team of security practitioners, economists, and engineers, the project aims to produce a policy toolkit that can effectively assist decision makers in identifying and reacting to public transportation and critical infrastructures threats.

The project began in 2012 under the assumption that achieving 100 percent protection of transport and other critical infrastructures is neither realistic nor sustainable. The goal instead, says the consortium, should be on minimizing threats in the most cost-efficient way possible. SECONOMICS, therefore, first set out to identify and mitigate major security threats by exploring the implementation of coordinated solutions that could work at the European level.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

The project has also investigated the economic causes and consequences of insecurity and the impact on the perception of citizens and the direct and indirect costs of implementation. Cost calculations placed specific emphasis on increased hidden costs, decreased efficiency, and trans-boundary impacts such as the interaction between security behavior and economic growth.

Following on from this, project case studies successfully identified key security threats in transport — air and metro — and other critical infrastructure. In this way, the challenges of achieving pan-European security coordination have been dealt with.

The release notes that it is expected that SECONOMICS, which is due for completion in January 2015, will provide a significant contribution to the development of state of the art security modeling, using the latest technological tools available. Through cutting edge risk assessments and analysis of the social context, it is hoped that optimal policies will be developed.

Indeed, the lasting impact of the project, says the consortium, will be a methodological revolution driven by a common, but diverse set, of modeling tools that seamlessly transverses the social, economic, and technological domains. The project is being carried out by an international consortium operating with eleven partners from seven different countries.