Advanced societies are crucially dependent on critical infrastructure networks for the reliable delivery of essential goods and services. Hence, well-founded analyses concerning disruptions are necessary to inform decisions that aim to ensure the performance of these networks in the face of failures caused by vulnerabilities to external hazards or technical malfunctions. In this setting, we develop an approach based on multicriteria decision analysis to support the identification of cost-efficient portfolios of preventive fortification actions. Our approach (i) accounts for multiple performance objectives, such as those that maximize the uninterrupted volume of traffic between different origin-destination pairs in a transportation network, (ii) uses methods of probabilistic risk assessment to quantify the expected performance of the network with regard to these objectives, and (iii) uses a search algorithm combined with an optimization model to identify those combinations of fortification actions that are cost-efficient in improving the performance of the network, given the available, possibly partial information about the relative importance of objectives and minimum performance requirements on them. Our methodological contributions are illustrated by a case study on the analysis of railway switches at a representative Finnish railway station.

翻译：现代社会高度依赖关键基础设施网络以可靠地提供基本商品和服务。因此，有必要基于扎实的分析来评估网络中断风险，以指导旨在确保这些网络在面临外部危害或技术故障导致的脆弱性时仍能维持性能的决策。在此背景下，我们开发了一种基于多准则决策分析的方法，以支持识别具有成本效益的预防性加固措施组合。我们的方法（i）考虑了多个性能目标，例如最大化运输网络中不同起点-终点对之间不间断的交通流量；（ii）采用概率风险评估方法，量化网络在这些目标上的预期性能；（iii）结合搜索算法与优化模型，在给定关于目标相对重要性和最低性能要求的可用（可能不完全）信息条件下，识别能够以成本效益方式提升网络性能的加固措施组合。我们通过一个针对芬兰典型铁路车站道岔分析的案例研究，展示了该方法论的贡献。