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Title: Integral approach to assessing the criticality of railway infrastructure elements

Authors: David Rehak; Simona Slivkova; Radim Pittner; Zdenek Dvorak

Addresses: Faculty of Safety Engineering, VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, Lumirova 13, 700 30 Ostrava, Czech Republic ' Faculty of Safety Engineering, VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, Lumirova 13, 700 30 Ostrava, Czech Republic ' Czech Railway Infrastructure Administration, Department of Safety and Crisis Management, Dlazdena 1003/7, 110 00 Prague, Czech Republic ' Faculty of Security Engineering, University of Žilina, 1. Maja 32, 010 26 Žilina, Slovak Republic

Abstract: In the last ten years, considerable attention has been paid to analysing and assessing the criticality of railway infrastructure elements. Publications on the subject mostly assess elements only from a certain point of view, such as purpose, reliability or risk. This leads to only a partial assessment of criticality without continuous correlation, which may result some critical elements of the system being omitted. The article introduces the railway infrastructure criticality assessment tool (RICA tool), which was created to evaluate the criticality of railway infrastructure elements in all aspects. The integral approach of the tool lies in comprehensively assessing the technical and process factors of rail transport. The criticality of railway infrastructure elements is therefore assessed not only in terms of the relevance and resilience of elements but also their interdependence, substitutability, risk and impact.

Keywords: railway infrastructure; criticality assessment; integral approach; RICA tool; technical and process factors.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIS.2020.107256

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2020 Vol.16 No.2, pp.107 - 129

Received: 13 Feb 2019
Accepted: 07 Jun 2019
Published online: 11 May 2020 *