A multi-criteria model for the security assessment of large-infrastructure construction sites

The construction of large infrastructures (e.g., railways, gas pipelines or power grids) is increasingly facing widespread and violent opposition of radical environmentalist and ideological groups. Therefore, it is necessary to consider also the risk related to violent opposition actions when selecting construction sites. However, the classical paradigm of risk considering probability and impact hardly applies in this context, especially because of the difficulty of assessing probabilities, due to the lack of historical and/or reliable data. This paper develops a novel framework to support the selection of construction sites for infrastructure development, considering the risk of attacks by radical or ideologically motivated groups. The main originality is that the risk of attacks is evaluated considering the attractiveness of the different locations for the attackers, based on several criteria. Specifically, a novel multi-criteria decision model is introduced, which involves fourteen criteria related to the effort required to the opponents for performing the attack and to the expected outcomes of the attack in terms of potential damage to the targeted infrastructures and visibility of the action; moreover, the lifespan of the construction site and its influence on the possibility of an attack are taken into account. The criteria have been selected by a pool of forty-four Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), i.e., security managers and experts from the academia, industry and law enforcement. With such criteria, it is possible to construct a holistic index of attractiveness and quantify it by the Sparse Analytic Hierarchy Process (SAHP), based on the evaluations of the criteria provided by the pool of SMEs. The proposed methodology is applied to support the localization of the construction sites for the cross-border section of the Turin–Lyon High Speed and High Capacity Railway, including a new base-tunnel. Indeed, such an 8.6 billion Euro project has experienced strong opposition in Italy and, hence, security has become one of the main issues to be considered. The proposed model constitutes a decision aid tool to support the selection of construction plans, considering attractiveness and impact of attack.