Reminder: The Safety4Rails project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 883532. It is coordinated by Fraunhofer EMI in Germany, started on 1st October 2020 and will last 24 months. The Safety4Rails Consortium is composed of 29 soon 31 partners including UIC as an end-users coordinator. SAFETY4RAILS aims to increase railway infrastructure resilience against combined cyber-physical threats.
On behalf of the SAFETY4RAILS consortium, UIC Security Division held the third SAFETY4RAILS (S4R) project end-users and advisory board workshop on 29 April 2021. The workshop focused on specific requirements for inter-city and intra-city railway & metro systems and brought together 42 participants. The audience included European railways and metro operators, external experts of the advisory board and research centres, among others.
The workshop was composed of three sessions: crisis management, crisis communication towards the public, and resilience of transport hubs from the smart city point of view.
The SAFETY4RAILS Consortium used the workshop to present initially defined specific requirements for inter-city and intra-city metro systems including crisis communication with citizens and social media.
The workshop began with an introduction to the project by the project coordinator, Stephen Crabbe (Fraunhofer EMI). He described the project’s approach to engineering resilience as an enabler for multimodal transport systems. The SAFETY4RAILS project aims to foster resilience by using automated tools and artificial intelligence, to better understand and predict threats for multimodal transport hubs as a part of the smart cities concept.
Next, Magdalena Kujacińska (UIC) presented about crisis management. She began by explaining the contents of a successful crisis management strategy, with a special focus on the security control room’s role within the company’s crisis management structure. She also described end -users requirements identified for prediction, prevention, detection, response, and recovery phases. The session continued with a presentation from Antonio de Santiago (Metro de Madrid) about the Madrid use case, which will focus on a physical attack of a stadium coupled with a cyber attack on the metro, leading to evacuation issues. He then demonstrated how the various tools from the SAFETY4RAILS project could be used to support the use case. Afterwards, an interactive session was held whereby the participants in the workshop were asked their opinion on the requirements presented.
This was followed by a presentation from Laura Petersen (UIC) about crisis communication towards the public and showcased the importance of the crisis communication plan. She then presented the various requirements for prevention, response and recovery. An interactive session was also held with participants to gather their viewpoints on the requirements.
The third session focused on the “Resilience of transportation hubs from the smart city point of view”. Marie-Hélène Bonneau (UIC) began her presentation by clarifying the definitions used by the SAFETY4RAIL project for the terms: smart city, multimodality and intermodality or transportation hubs. One of the main findings was that it is crucial to improve and foster the cooperation and information exchange between all stakeholders in order to further develop prevention and detection actions and enhance the overall resilience of a transport hub. This was followed by a use case presentation by Marina Trentin (Commune di Milano - Milan Municipality), who shared that the City of Milan use case will focus on flooding and presented which SAFETY4RAILS tools would be useful for this case.
The workshop was preceded by the two workshops held on 15 December 2020 and 15 March 2021 that aimed on comprehensive analysis of current threats face by railways and metro stakeholders and on validation and prioritisation of end-user requirements for the SAFETY4RAILS Information System (S4RIS).
The next workshop will be held in June. It will focus on the description of the scenarios that will be the basis for the simulation exercises and evaluation of the S4RIS. platform in operational environment.
SAFETY4RAILS can be followed on Twitter @Safety4R as well as on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/safety4rails-eu-project/)
The project website is available at https://safety4rails.eu/
