Cyber Resilience Meta-Modelling: The Railway Communication Case Study

Information Security and Privacy in Railway Transportation: A Systematic Review

Intelligent transportation systems will play a key role in the smart cities of the future. In particular, railway transportation is gaining attention as a promising solution to cope with the mobility challenges in large urban areas. Thanks to the miniaturisation of sensors and the deployment of fast data networks, the railway industry is being augmented with contextual, real-time information that opens the door to novel and personalised services. Despite the benefits of this digitalisation, the high complexity of railway transportation entails a number of challenges, particularly from security and privacy perspectives. Since railway assets are attractive targets for terrorism, coping with strong security and privacy requirements such as cryptography and privacy-preserving methods is of utmost importance. This article provides a thorough systematic literature review on information security and privacy within railway transportation systems, following the well-known methodology proposed by vom Brocke et al. We sketch out the most relevant studies and outline the main focuses, challenges and solutions described in the literature, considering technical, societal, regulatory and ethical approaches. Additionally, we discuss the remaining open issues and suggest several research lines that will gain relevance in the years to come.

A Meta-Level Framework for Evaluating Resilience in Net-Zero Carbon Power Systems with Extreme Weather Events in the United States

Important changes are underway in the U.S. power industry in the way that electricity is sourced, transported, and utilized. Disruption from extreme weather events and cybersecurity events is bringing new scrutiny to power-system resilience. Recognizing the complex social and technical aspects that are involved, this article provides a meta-level framework for coherently evaluating and making decisions about power-system resilience. It does so by examining net-zero carbon strategies with quantitative, qualitative, and integrative dimensions across discrete location-specific systems and timescales. The generalizable framework is designed with a flexibility and logic that allows for refinement to accompany stakeholder review processes and highly localized decision-making. To highlight the framework’s applicability across multiple timescales, processes, and types of knowledge, power system outages are reviewed for extreme weather events, including 2021 and 2011 winter storms that impacted Texas, the 2017 Hurricane Maria that affected Puerto Rico, and a heatwave/wildfire event in California in August 2020. By design, the meta-level framework enables utility decision-makers, regulators, insurers, and communities to analyze and track levels of resilience safeguards for a given system. Future directions to advance an integrated science of resilience in net-zero power systems and the use of this framework are also discussed.