Guidelines for stress-test design for non-nuclear critical infrastructures and systems: methodology

Critical infrastructures (CIs) are of essential importance for modern society: these systems provide the essential functions of public safety and enable, through their services, the higher-level functions of a community, such as housing, education, healthcare and the economy. A harmonized approach for stress testing critical non-nuclear infrastructures, ST@STREST, has been developed. The aims of the ST@STREST methodology and framework are to quantify the safety and the risk of individual components as well as of whole CI system with respect to extreme events, and to compare the expected behavior of the CI to acceptable values. This report summarizes the ST@STREST methodology and framework, and addresses the extensions of the proposed methodology towards life-cycle management of civil infrastructures and evaluation of civil infrastructure system post-disaster resilience. A detailed elaboration of these topics is presented in the accompanying Work Package 5 reports. The ST@STREST methodology has been applied to six key representative Critical Infrastructures (CIs) in Europe, exposed to variant hazards, namely: a petrochemical plant in Milazzo, Italy, large dams of the Valais region in Switzerland, hydrocarbon pipelines in Turkey, the Gasunie national gas storage and distribution network in the Netherlands, the port infrastructure of Thessaloniki, Greece and an industrial district in the region of Tuscany, Italy. The outcomes of these stress tests are presented in the STREST Reference Report 5.