3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
design level (infrastructures, vehicles and communication and information systems) and the
education level (availability of persons with adequate skills to make the system function).
The TIR strategy proposes a radical change of the transportation systems of people and goods;
the risks for the transport system in the TIR scenario, resides mainly in the lack of supply of
electricity for charging vehicles and communication systems and in the collapse of the
infrastructures components exposed to weather events, terrorism and cyber-attacks.
So two questions arise:
- Is the proposed TIR strategy transport system more or less resilient than the current
system?
- Is the proposed TIR strategy transport system proposed sufficiently resilient? And if not,
how can it be made so?
The proposed TIR transport system will rely primarily on the same physical infrastructure of the
existing transport system and will inherit its positive features that make it resilient: universality,
to accommodate many different types of vehicles (diversity), offering multiple alternative
modes and routes (redundancy); capacity to function even if partly damaged (robustness).
However, the TIR strategy for transport and mobility also proposes a number of fundamental
changes in the current transportation system:
- Total shift towards renewable resources: Renewable energy is produced locally and
mainly at small generation plants across the territory. This greatly increases local
resilience since the region is protected against geo-political events that may jeopardize
the supply of fossil fuels. It is also less likely that all small generation plants will fail,
causing a catastrophic failure of the entire system. The electricity distribution system for
transport can be made more resilient by making it redundant and self-fixing (robust).
- Electrification of the powertrain of the vehicles: The electrification of the vehicles, on
the one hand, may increase the robustness of the distribution system, which does not
rely on road-based tankers and shipments but, on the other hand, it will also make it
less robust, since it cannot count on reservoirs. Liquid and gas fossil fuels, in fact, can be
stored in large quantities, while electric energy is extremely difficult to store. Electric
vehicles, having a much higher efficiency than fossil-fuel vehicles, are also more resilient
against economic collapse. The system can be made more resilient by adopting a mixed
strategy of power supply, comprising external supply, on-board batteries and, in the
future, hydrogen fuel cells (diversity and redundancy).
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