The functioning of society depends on the transportation of goods and persons. The infrastructure required to enable transportation is built to ensure that this can happen safely and smoothly, providing specified high levels of service.
As Europe has already experienced on many occasions, reductions in service due to potentially disruptive events, such as floods, earthquakes, heavy snow falls, fog, high winds, or cyberattacks can have significant societal consequences.
In this context, transport infrastructure managers must minimise the impact and potential consequences of these disruptive events. To do so, objective information on the service provided by their transport infrastructure and its resilience to external adverse events is necessary.
In order to help them acquire this information, in November CEN and CENELEC published new CWA 17819:2021 'Guidelines for the assessment of resilience of transport infrastructure to potentially disruptive events'. This document provides managers with guidance to proceed a complete and systematic definition of service and measure resilience, in all situations with which the manager is confronted, and to help identify the suitable interventions to enhance such resilience.
This work was initiated through the FORESEE Project, ‘Future proofing strategies FOr RESilient transport networks against Extreme Events’, which is an EU collaborative research project funded by Horizon 2020. For further details on FORESEE, please visit the website https://foreseeproject.eu/.
CWA 17819:2021 is freely available for download here. It was developed by CEN/CLC/WS 018 ‘Assessment of the resilience of transport infrastructure to potentially disruptive events’, whose Secretariat is held by UNE, Spain’s National Standardization Institute.
Thierry LEGRAND
tlegrand@cencenelec.eu
