Concept

PANOPTIS concept will result in an environment that boosts planning (Climate Change/sustainability), engineering (RI protection) and operations (traffic, emergency management and security).

The proposed approach contains three strategic levers: policy, people, and programs. Each level focuses simultaneously in two different aspects: system and infrastructure component. At the same time, there are two different periods of interest: pre-event (risk reduction) and post-event (impact reduction).

There is a commonality shared in all these faces of the transportation community. There is a new appreciation for the challenges inherent in reconciling the similarities and distinctions among four common inter-related topics:

a) Critical Infrastructure,

b) Risk Management,

c) Protection 

d) All Hazards Emergency Management.

The development of a new strategy, based on resilience assessment, includes a broad range of options to help manage risks and recover from system disruptions. In this new paradigm, resilience does not replace the four concepts. Instead it offers an overarching strategy that includes Risk Management, Protection and Preparedness as complementary strategies to prevent attacks and to identify and ward off additional threats and Adaptation, Recovery and other post-disruption strategies to restore normal road/transportation services, as well as longer term strategic approaches to adapt to Climate Change and to wield policy tools for economic resilience.

Such strategic approaches of improving the resilience that will be assessed during PANOPTIS will include adding redundancies to the assets or systems, having back-up components available, adaptation capabilities allowing process to switch from one input or component to another, reduce vulnerabilities to specific identified threats, coordination and response capabilities during a disruptive event and assessing contingency planning, establishing priority access to critical resources, understanding and confronting interdependences