Fortifying Critical Infrastructure Networks with Multicriteria Portfolio Decision Analysis: An Application to Railway Stations in Finland

Abstract

Advanced societies are crucially dependent on critical infrastructure networks for the reliable delivery of essential goods and services. Hence, well-founded analyses concerning disruptions are necessary to inform decisions that aim to ensure the performance of these networks in the face of failures caused by vulnerabilities to external hazards or technical malfunctions. In this setting, we develop an approach based on multicriteria decision analysis to support the identification of cost-efficient portfolios of preventive fortification actions. Our approach (i) accounts for multiple performance objectives, such as those that maximize the uninterrupted volume of traffic between different origin-destination pairs in a transportation network, (ii) uses methods of probabilistic risk assessment to quantify the expected performance of the network with regard to these objectives, and (iii) uses a search algorithm combined with an optimization model to identify those combinations of fortification actions that are cost-efficient in improving the performance of the network, given the available, possibly partial information about the relative importance of objectives and minimum performance requirements on them. Our methodological contributions are illustrated by a case study on the analysis of railway switches at a representative Finnish railway station.