• Energy Research
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Traditionally, critical infrastructures demand for high dependability, being the services they provide essential to human beings and the society at large. However, more recent attention to cautious usage of energy resources is changing this vision and calls for solutions accounting for appropriate multi-requirements combinations when developing a critical infrastructure. In such a context, analysis supports able to assist the designer in envisioning a satisfactory trade-off among the multi-requirements for the system at hand are highly helpful. In this paper, the focus is on the railway sector and the contribution is a stochastic model-based analysis framework to quantitatively assess trade-offs between dependability indicators and electrical energy consumption incurred by the rail switch heating system.Moving from a preliminary study that concentrated on energy consumption only, the analysis framework has been extended to become a solid support to devise appropriate tuning of the heating policy that guarantees satisfactory trade-offs between dependability and energy consumption. An evaluation campaign in a variety of climate scenarios demonstrates the feasibility and utility of the developed framework.

Power system controls are vulnerable to cyber-attacks that can seriously affect and even inhibit their operation. Such attacks may affect large portions of the power system, make repair difficult and cause huge societal impact, so pressure to ensure cyber-security of control and communication systems is now strong worldwide. Several cyber-security frameworks were developed, but it is rather difficult to anticipate adoption costs and benefits, and this hampers their generalised adoption. T his paper focuses on the outcome of two case studies (concerning the Italian power generation and the Polish transmission systems. The socio-economic impact of failures and the costs of standard adoption are estimated on an objective basis. It is up to public authorities to decide whether to require the adoption of security standards to operators in the electric system. The nature of public good of security underlines the necessity of public support for this operation, but we discuss the extent and the management of this support.