Resilience of chemical industrial areas through attenuation-based security

This paper investigates the possibility of attenuation-based security within chemical industrial areas. Representing chemical industrial areas as mathematical networks, we prove by case-study that the resilience to disaster of such areas may follow a power-law distribution. Furthermore, we examine what happens to the network when highly hazardous installations would be intelligently protected against malicious acts: the network disintegrates into separate smaller networks. Hence, islands are formed with no escalation danger in between. We conclude that it is possible to protect chemical industrial areas in such a way that they are more resilient against terrorism. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.