Assessing the attractiveness of chemical and process facilities to terrorism using a situational crime prevention approach

Abstract

As intentional attacks to industry have been on the rise in the last years, researchers and institutions put effort in addressing risks of industrial assets exposed to acts of interference. One of the key steps of security risk assessment is the evaluation of the attractiveness, i.e. determining which installation or part of it could be of interest to a potential attacker. As security concerns are intrinsically tied to human intention, attractiveness does not only depend on technical characteristics of the facility, but also on the type of threat and its geographic, economic, and socio-political context. Therefore, interdisciplinarity is among the key features of a team tasked with assessing attractiveness. This work is the result of the joint effort of Physical Sciences and Engineering experts and Social Sciences and Humanities experts, and it presents a methodology for the assessment of attractiveness of process facilities to physical terroristic attacks developed using a “terrorist thinking” approach. Technical factors such as plant layout and physical protection systems were combined with modern criminology principles (namely Situational Crime Prevention, i.e. how actors take advantage of situated opportunities to commit a crime) to obtain a comprehensive picture of the possible motives behind a physical terroristic attack to a chemical and process facility (meant as facilities where chemical substances are present and where chemical and/or physical processes occurs). The methodology was applied to a case study featuring facilities located in a critical context; a ranking among facilities was obtained, and the robustness of the results was tested through a Monte Carlo-based uncertainty analysis. The results revealed that it is not possible to obtain a clear ranking of critical facilities accounting only for technical or non-technical factors, but both are necessary. The method developed was demonstrated easy to apply and could be used not only by plant security managers, but also by Institutions and Governments to prioritize critical assets in threatening contexts.