Feature-Driven Survey of Physical Protection Systems

Many systems nowadays require protection against security or safety threats. A physical protection system (PPS) integrates people, procedures, and equipment to protect assets or facilities. PPSs have targeted various systems, including airports, rail transport, highways, hospitals, bridges, the electricity grid, dams, power plants, seaports, oil refineries, and water systems. Hence, PPSs are characterized by a broad set of features, from which part is common, while other features are variant and depend on the particular system to be developed. The notion of PPS has been broadly addressed in the literature, and even domain-specific PPS development methods have been proposed. However, the common and variant features are fragmented across many studies. This situation seriously impedes the identification of the required features and likewise the guidance of the systems engineering process of PPSs. To enhance the understanding and support the guidance of the development of PPS, in this paper, we provide a feature-driven survey of PPSs. The approach applies a systematic domain analysis process based on the state-of-the-art of PPSs. It presents a family feature model that defines the common and variant features and herewith the configuration space of PPSs