Empirical analysis of security critical events in urban areas

Security for critical infrastructure and the vulnerability analysis of urban areas is a topic of growing interest. Reasons for this are a growing urbanization and an increasing number of new hazard scenarios. More and more people are living in urban areas and this trend is set to continue. When faced with the increasing hazards, like global terrorism or natural disasters for example, it is essential to consider these exceptional scenarios in the context of safety and security research. Therefore, it is the aim to integrate protection design as an inherent part of building development and urban planning. In a first step, a decisive scenario as assessment basis has to be defined to evaluate urban areas or single buildings. This is essential to build a basis for a schematic hazard and risk analysis. In this paper, the results of an empirical event analysis are presented. Within this work security critical events are evaluated using the Terrorist Event Database. The results build the basis for the empirical evaluation and pursuing quantitative risk analyses for safety critical scenarios.