Specifying the explosion-resistant railway carriage—a ‘bench’ test of the Security Function Framework

摘要

Anyone trying to devise counter-terrorist designs for railway carriages faces a range of issues. In particular, designers need a framework for thinking about security. This article explores the specific practical design problem of securing railway carriages against explosive terrorist attacks and assesses the benefits of articulating such exploration through the use of the Security Function Framework (SFF). We present the SFF framework, apply it to the ExRes carriage and evaluate it according to defined criteria. Our evaluation shows that the SFF framework is clearly expressed, aids the designer in communicating design requirements, facilitates systematic creativity without necessarily generating completely new ideas, and appears practically applicable. However, we emphasize that ours have been ‘bench tests’; such tests are really no substitute for trying the SFF out with real life designers.