A model-driven process for physical protection system design and vulnerability evaluation

Vulnerability of railway physical assets against adversary’s attacks is affected by a number of factors, hence the effectiveness of the physical security system in charge of protecting the potential targets is a crucial aspect in homeland security applications. This chapter addresses vulnerability modeling and analysis with a special focus on designing physical protection system for railways security. The Model-Driven process developed within the METRIP project is presented, which supports the automatic generation of vulnerability analysis models and the instantiation of optimization model templates for the localization of the protection devices. The steps and the aspects covered by the proposed process are described: the UML profile which has been developed to extend UML with protection and physical vulnerability concepts, the model transformations implementing the inter- face towards the optimization models and the automated generation of vulnerability models, as well as the mechanism to return the results to the designer. Finally, the overall process has been applied to a railway station from the METRIP case study. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.