3 RELATED WORKS
In this section a short overview of the present ap-
proaches to risk management and existing applica-
tions of DSS will be presented.
3.1 Risk Management
There are a number of solutions on the Polish mar-
ket which offer risk management support for railway
transportation, e.g. RailSoft (Petrosoft, 2017). The
RailSoft software is an integrated security manage-
ment system for railway companies in accordance
with the requirements of MMS/SMS. The software
has an analysis module RAMS (Reliability, Avail-
ability, Maintainability, Safety) which enables to test
railway systems in terms of their reliability, mainte-
nance and application safety. RailSoft also allows
to generate reports about security events in the com-
pany, which can be sent to the national ORT. Still, the
system does not ensure the exchange of information
about security events between railway companies.
There are also applications for risk analysis and
assessment, though these solutions are not dedicated
to railway companies. The available software was de-
signed to assess the risk for classified information, oc-
cupational hazards and operational risk. For example,
the application Risk Analysis (F-tec, 2019) enables to
analyze classified information in accordance with the
requirements of the Internal Security Agency.
There is no obligation to immediately inform
about identified internal threats or vulnerabilities.
ORT provides a portal where people can report de-
tected threats, security issues. However, in practice,
even if railway companies report such information,
usually they do not do it on a regular basis. There
are more elaborate tools supporting analyses, e.g. Re-
liability Workbench (Isograph, 2019), but they do not
offer the threat information exchange option.
Basically, on the European market there are no
integrated systems or platforms for the management
of railway threats, yet there have been attempts to
develop and implement such platforms. For exam-
ple, European Railway Agency (ERA) launched the
Safety Alerts IT Tool (SAIT) platform to exchange in-
formation about events that can potentially lead to ac-
cidents. The obligation to exchange such information
is a new requirement imposed by a European directive
(European Parliament, 2016). ERA facilitates one
more application, ERA SMS, which enables carriers
and managers to assess the functioning of their secu-
rity management systems. The application allows to
check the conformance with new SMS requirements
(so called 4th Railway Package).
3.2 Decision Support Systems
Decision support systems have evolved with the de-
velopment of technology (Shim et al., 2002) and
as it was mentioned in the Introduction section,
there are several types of DSSes defined in literature
(Power et al., 2015), such as: data-driven, model-
driven, document-driven, communication-driven, and
knowledge-driven DSS. A decision support system
can be of one type, however, it can also contain sub-
systems representing different DSS types.
A characteristic feature of a data-driven DSS is ac-
cess to and processing of time series that can be inter-
nal or external company data (Power, 2008). The data
that are processed within the system can be stored in
various locations starting from a file system, where a
query and retrieval functionality is provided, up to a
data warehouse (Kimball and Ross, 2011; Poe et al.,
1997), where advanced data manipulation methods
are available. An appropriate data repository is par-
ticularly important for further analysis, inference and
decision support. Thanks to that, it is possible to in-
tegrate data from various sources and to clean and
prepare them. Such data-driven systems are used for
data originating, e.g., from sensors (Dong et al., 2018;
´
Sl˛ezak et al., 2018; Janusz et al., 2017).
The data stored in a system repository can be pro-
cessed by means of advanced data analysis methods
in order to derive a model assisting in decision mak-
ing. The systems where a model plays central role
are called model-driven DSSes (Power and Sharda,
2007). Such systems enable a non-technical user to
access a model by a dedicated interface. Additionally,
the created model is intended to be applied repeatedly
in the same or similar decision situation. The mod-
els utilized in the system can be of various types, e.g.,
differential equation models, analytical hierarchy pro-
cess based models, or forecasting models.
4 PRELIMINARY STUDIES
The support of risk management has to comprise
supporting tools (which implement certain knowable
practices), e.g. risk analysis methods, risk analyzers,
vulnerability analyzers, countermeasures. The sup-
port must be based on credible data on whose basis
(having already concrete quantitative data) it is pos-
sible to recommend certain solutions or to assess the
importance of defined threats. The data necessary for
risk analyses cover a wide spectrum of information,
in terms of range, structure, granulation, and quanti-
tative aspects. A part of the data which are the ba-
sis to conduct risk analyses are entered by the opera-
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