Strengthening Resilience of Electricity Critical Infrastructure in the Context of Railway Transport

Abstract

The energy sector is crucial in the critical infrastructure system, since other critical infrastructure sectors are dependent on energy supplies. Electricity infrastructure is one of the key sectors of critical infrastructure and, moreover, this sector has been recognized as uniquely critical. This makes it necessary to ensure a high level of protection of energy sector elements, especially by strengthening their resilience. A power outage would have a negative effect on dependent subsystems of critical infrastructure (e.g. transport). The electricity sector is constantly exposed to negative threats; therefore, it is important that the electricity elements achieve a high level of resilience, which in the critical infrastructure system is defined as the ability to reduce the extent and/or duration of disruptive events, absorb negative phenomena, and adapt or quickly recover from potentially dangerous events. The key output of this paper is the proposal of a procedure for strengthening the resilience of electricity critical infrastructure. By applying tools to strengthen resilience, the element becomes more resilient to internal and external negative phenomena, thereby reducing its vulnerability. This results in the strengthening of the resilience of dependent elements of the railway critical infrastructure.