Vulnerability analysis of critical infrastructures with the Event Tree Technique

Abstract

The vulnerability analysis of a critical infrastructure is certainly a complex and articulated study; therefore, it requires the use of reliable decision support tools. In this article, after a brief review of the state of the art on risk analysis studies for critical infrastructures, a vulnerability analysis will be performed on a railway infrastructure under the hypothesis of an intentional attack by a criminal group. Specifically, the aim of this paper is to show how the application of the event tree technique - derived from the more well-known fault tree analysis - can allow to define the different scenarios. For each one, a probabilistic assessment will be carried out through numerical simulations with the Monte Carlo method in order to calculate the security level of this infrastructure.