Resilience of Critical Infrastructure

The availability and functionality of the traffic routes is an essential requirement for social participation, the maintenance of supply and disposal, and further prosperous economic development in our collaborative and globalized society. Simultaneously, threats from extreme weather events favored by climate change or threats from terrorism are becoming increasingly important.

For this reason, the Federal Government and the European Commission attach great importance to the protection of this critical infrastructures. In order to protect our traffic routes from these dangers, their resilience must be increased. Resilient traffic routes are prepared for hazards and can ward them off, cope with them, recover from them as quickly as possible, and adapt to them more and more successfully.

In our research projects, we develop procedures and methods to identify particularly critical parts of the transport network. We elaborate solutions that enable an analysis of the threat situation and assess their effects and risks.

With partners from various specialist disciplines, we evaluate measures and instruments to increase the resilience of traffic routes specifically. Our analyzes focus equally on the network-wide traffic flow and the individual road users and aim at their effective protection.

PTV's simulation and modeling tools are an integral part of the processes we have developed and enable us to make well-founded statements based on reliable data.

Our fields of action

We offer solutions that help owners and operators of traffic infrastructures identify which network sections are particularly critical and which measures are suitable for their protection against the background of the overall economic importance of traffic networks.

  • Concepts and cost assessments for relevant infrastructure protection measures
  • Analyses to identify critical traffic infrastructures
  • Vulnerability analyses, risk and resilience assessments
  • Model-based determination of traffic effects

Our product portfolio supports you on this and many other topics.

Selected projects 

Bridges and tunnels are indispensable engineering structures to provide efficient and safe road connections in inner cities and overland. However, they often represent particularly critical infrastructures due to their usually geographically determined bottleneck function for the road network. In the research projects SKRIBT and SKRIBT+, SeRoN and the project RITUN, Traffic Impacts of the Non-availability of Road Tunnels, we developed methods to quantify the criticality of tunnels and bridges based on traffic models, even for a large number of structures. To be able to protect these structures in a targeted manner, we also developed risk-based procedures in the projects, enabling protective measures to be evaluated from an overall economic perspective, also based on traffic models.

Public transport networks are an indispensable part of the overall traffic infrastructure, especially in urban areas. For this reason, we have developed model-based methods for determining the vulnerability of public transport stations in the French-German research project U-THREAT, which was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research on the German side.

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