Leonardo’s Safety4Rails project leads the way for public rail transport’s safety

24 March 2021

The public railway network is an increasingly important infrastructure for commuting European citizens. which makes it an increasingly strategic target for both cyber and physical attacks.

Safety4Rails is a data-based analysis tool designed to improve the safety and security of trans-modal metro and RAILway networks, by detecting, preventing, mitigating and responding to a wide range of potential attacks. Safety4Rails is funded by the European Union within the Horizon 2020 objectives with the aim of improving rail passenger transport safety, and Leonardo is one of the main technological contributors to this project, coordinated by the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft of Munich.

The Safety4Rails aims to create solutions to improve the current level of safety and the restoration of urban and extra-urban rail transport, focusing on the prevention and management of an incident which occurs during the peak hours of the service -  time where the network is most crowded and prompt intervention is vital in securing passenger safety and ensuring that the service returns to operation as soon as possible.

Safety4Rails will analyze the cyber and physical resilience of current rail transport IT systems and recommend strategies for improving the response in critical situations. It will also constantly update the infrastructure to become resilient to the evolving threat landscape

At the heart of this project is the Safety4Rails Information System (S4RIS), which is capable of analyzing the impact of the various possible prevention and response strategies. S4RIS will combine simulation and monitoring capabilities, using artificial intelligence solutions and will be enriched by the Ganimede video analysis platform, a technology developed and realized by Leonardo. Which will implement specific functionalities for the railway infrastructure.

Leonardo will analyse many different possible designs and develop a graph data model, validated by the Neo4J software to optimise the information system for multimodal transport. The model will be tested on an experimental basis, in collaboration with RFI, at the Termini station in Rome.

For more information: cyberandsecurity@leonardo.com

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