Resilience in a critical infrastructure system can be viewed as a quality that reduces vulnerability, minimizes the consequences of threats, accelerates response and recovery, and facilitates adaptation to a disruptive event. In this context, comprehensive knowledge of the environment and of the main factors whereby resilience is determined, limited, and affected can be said to represent the fundamental precondition for strengthening the resilience of critical infrastructure elements. Based on this idea, the article defines the initial and functional conditions for building and strengthening the resilience of critical infrastructure elements, i.e., the resilience concept in a critical infrastructure system. Subsequently, factors determining the resilience of these elements are identified, both in terms of technical resilience (i.e., robustness and recoverability) and organizational resilience (i.e., adaptability). In the final part of the article, these factors are presented in greater detail in the context of case studies focused on the electricity, gas, information and communications technology, and road transport sectors. Determination of these factors is examined with regard to the intensity of a disruptive event and the performance of the respective critical infrastructure element.
This article focuses on the issue of assessing the cascading effects of critical energy and transport infrastructure elements at the fundamental level. The introductory part deals with the typology of failures and their impacts, which spread through the critical infrastructure system. At this stage, the paper presents current approaches to assessing the cascading effects and, in particular, addresses a newly developed assessment methodology. The following part defines the initial conditions of assessment and describes selected elements from the areas of energy and rail transport to which the methodology will be subsequently applied. The main part of the article is a case study of the proposed methodology, assessing the cascading effects by calculating the value of their risks, depending on the resilience and correlation of the rated elements.
In the last ten years, considerable attention has been paid to analysing and assessing the criticality of railway infrastructure elements. Publications on the subject mostly assess elements only from a certain point of view, such as purpose, reliability or risk. This leads to only a partial assessment of criticality without continuous correlation, which may result some critical elements of the system being omitted. The article introduces the railway infrastructure criticality assessment tool (RICA tool), which was created to evaluate the criticality of railway infrastructure elements in all aspects. The integral approach of the tool lies in comprehensively assessing the technical and process factors of rail transport. The criticality of railway infrastructure elements is therefore assessed not only in terms of the relevance and resilience of elements but also their interdependence, substitutability, risk and impact.
As the number of threats and the severity of their impact increases, an ever greater emphasis is being placed on the protection of critical infrastructure. Thus, the issue of resilience, or its assessment and strengthening, is increasingly coming to the fore. The resilience assessment of critical infrastructure, especially in the energy sector, has received considerable attention due to the high level of interest in this issue. However, the issue of strengthening resilience poses a significant challenge not only in the energy sector but also in the entire critical infrastructure system. Despite the great importance of this area, there is not a large number of authors moving in this direction and paying attention to resilience-strengthening tools. For this reason, the aim of this article is to provide the reader with a comprehensive methodological overview of resilience strengthening in the critical energy infrastructure sector. This article also provides an overview of internal and external tools suitable for strengthening resilience and presents a possible procedure for their application to energy critical infrastructure elements.
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