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Natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other tragedies can strike urban centres, causing damage to critical infrastructure such as transport. While these events are often unpredictable, resilience management is dedicated to making responses as effective as possible, to minimise the risk to people and property, and to map out recovery plans.
Findings from the EU-funded RESOLUTE project will go towards developing clear-cut guidelines for improving collaboration among next-generation emergency services and models for streamlining decision-making processes. The aim is to boost the resilience of critical infrastructure and the systems affected, and to improve the response from key urban transport players.
‘Resilience’ is an increasingly important subject in Europe, a key part of which being how vital infrastructure such as urban transport systems respond to disasters. Transport systems provide critical support to all other socio-economic activities, as well as being significant economic contributors in their own right, and transport is a path to recovery, conveying people, goods and information.
Difficulties in maintaining system variability under control, scattered responsibilities, unstructured communication flows, unclear safety drills, business and mission-critical decisions in the event of potentially lengthy outages… all these issues and more must be taken into consideration.
The RESOLUTE project, which is based on the vision of achieving sustained adaptability of UTS to enhance resilience, has conducted a systematic review of contemporary resilience-assessment and management concepts. Cooperation and information sharing among all stakeholders is critical, as is improved communication with citizens and authorities.
Whether it is saving lives or reducing damage to infrastructure, people play a vital role in getting systems back on track as fast as possible – based on clear, confident and evidence driven decision-making before, during and after crises. This means combining real-time scoping activities based on big data and early-warning systems, while monitoring and analysing the Internet of Things and traffic network data across Europe, with citizen preparedness training based on game techniques. Researchers have also developed or refined decision-support tools to improve how quickly and efficiently urban transport can respond to critical scenarios. .