The latest innovation project in which we are participating, Safety4Rails, has now officially started and we are beginning our work to improve rail safety and utility in a world of interconnected devices and systems. Check back here soon for a link to the project website and social media channels!
Safety4Rails delivers methods and systems to increase the safety and recovery of track-based inter-city railway and intra-city metro transportation. It addresses both cyber-only attacks (such as impact from WannaCry infections), physical-only attacks (such as the Madrid commuter trains bombing in 2014) and combined cyber-physical attacks, which an important emerging scenarios are given increasing IoT infrastructure integration. SAFETY4RAILS concentrates on rush hour rail transport scenarios where many passengers are using metros and railways to commute to work or attend mass events (e.g. large multi-venue sporting events such as the Olympics).
When an incident occurs during heavy usage, metro and railway operators have to consider many aspects to ensure passenger safety and security, e.g. carry out a threat analysis, maintain situation awareness, establish crisis communication and response, and they have to ensure that mitigation steps are taken and communicated to travellers and other users. SAFETY4RAILS will improve the handling of such events through a holistic approach.
It will analyse the cyber-physical resilience of metro and railway systems and deliver mitigation strategies for an efficient response, and, in order to remain secure given ever-changing novel emerging risks, it will facilitate continuous adaptation of the SAFETY4RAILS solution; this is validated by two rail transport operators and the results supporting the re-design of the final prototype.
The project leading to this application has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 883532.