Assessing The Resilience of Railway Organisation For Unexpected External Events

Abstract

The railway transportation system is a critical infrastructure that supports the functionality of a country through ways like the transportation of people from point to point to carry out their daily activities i.e., work, study, and leisure; the timely transportation of freight within a country or cross-borders, contributing to economic development, etc., thus it has to be effective in its operation and service provision. Normal operation can get affected when railway systems such as trains, signalling systems, etc. fail to operate, railway infrastructures are damaged, occurrences of collisions or derailment. These events result in inconveniences caused to railway users, loss in service confidence and decline in revenue. Hence, railway organisations continuously put in effort to reduce the occurrence of railway disruptions that are within their means to prevent. However, there have been reports on railway disruptions caused by events that are uncontrollable within the means of the organisations. The railway transportation system faces continuous ‘threats’ despite the continuous effort put in by railway organisations to provide mitigation measures. This thesis has classified these ‘threats’ as expected and unexpected. Expected ‘threats’ refer to events whereby their potential of disrupting the operation of the railway transportation system is anticipated, thus mitigation measures can be implemented in advance so as to eliminate or prevent the event from happening. On the other hand, unexpected ‘threats’ refer to events whereby the occurrences cannot be controlled and sometimes it can be unpredictable. The objective of this thesis is to study how the resilience of a railway organisation, in view of the occurrences of 2 unexpected external events (i.e., climate change and cyber-attack), can be assessed by incorporating the elements of the 4R Resilience Framework to its operation and management. The assessment work is carried out through a semi-qualitative tool created by this thesis which adopts a systematic approach by making use of a 5-stages cycle framework.