Critical Infrastructure Protection & Security

Our critical transportation and industrial infrastructure often involves unique forms, settings or requirements that don’t conform to the better-understood parameters of standard buildings. We provide an array of complementary services to protect and secure these structures, and more, from natural and human-induced hazards.

• Suspension, cable-stayed, and truss and arch bridges
• Concrete, cast-iron, brick, under-river and in-soil tunnels
• Heavy and commuter rail infrastructure, including elevated tracks and passenger stations
• Aviation infrastructure, including terminals, parking garages and fuel storage facilities
• Bus terminals

We develop threat, vulnerability and risk assessment (TVRA) studies and fully design mitigation measures for new and existing structures, both modern and historic. Our assessments address structural elements, glazing systems, and surrounding topographical and landscape details.

Our approach is anchored in DHS- and CPNI-based best practices, which we’ve helped to propound since 2001, and in owner-specific requirements and operations.

Our Process – Four Main Steps

Threat identification. We define threats and threat scenarios, ranging from human-induced threats – explosion; fire; chemical, biological or radiological (CBR) attack; equipment sabotage; impact and ramming – to accidental or natural hazards such as fire, flood or wind, to develop a design-basis threat report (DBT).

Threat assessment. We perform vulnerability and risk assessments to quantify the consequences of each threat type in terms of loss of life, property damage, operational disruptions and loss of function.

Threat mitigation. We develop mitigation countermeasures – protective design, physical, electronic and operational security programs, rapid recovery and others – and quantify associated risk reductions.

Prioritization. We provide cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to help our clients most effectively prioritize mitigation measures.

Unmatched Analytical & Simulation Capabilities
Accurately quantifying the consequences of an attack is critical to defining mitigation measures that strike the right balance between aesthetics and essential security and operational resilience. We’ve developed state-of-the art software tools that accurately simulate different regimes of physics. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software enables us to perform precise airblast and underwater-explosion load analyses. Our nonlinear explicit dynamic finite-element analysis software allows us to evaluate the resulting structural response.

We’ve also built a number of computer programs that predict the dynamics of extreme events with the fidelity needed to develop integrated, cost-effective mitigation measures. The results from our software have been validated against large-scale explosive experiments performed under the aegis of the U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and other government entities.

Securing Infrastructure from the Start
The best way to incorporate mitigation measures is to “bake them in” to the base design. So we like to get involved in the design process early and collaborate with all project stakeholders from the earliest phases. And when these services are combined with our in-house structural and façade engineering capabilities, we can deliver seamlessly coordinated designs for each discipline. When we do, the results are superior architecture, faster design and construction, and a better bottom line.