Analysing Railway Safety with Systems Thinking
Railway system is a socio-technical system because the operation of such system also heavily relies on the management of human activities and operating procedures in the organisation, as well as the execution, of technical subsystems. Safety of these systems therefore is more than just about engineering their technical subsystems. The latest approach from systems engineering considers that an accident is due to inadequate controlled interactions in the system and is usually a dynamic event chain started from the activation of a hazard and culminated in a complex process of sequential and concurrent events until the system is eventually out of control. Meanwhile the analysis of these systems’ safety becomes much harder when simply applying the traditional techniques of safety assessment. It is because, first of all, a social-technical system consists of a lot of complex and non-linear interactions, and traditional techniques show their limits when analysing complex systems. And secondly, the safety of a social-technical system requires a system perspective, which should take all the behaviours (desired and undesired but predicted) of a system as a whole in the context of its environment. To capture the information needed, the models for these analyses (i.e., fault tree and FMEA table) will become too complex to have a systemic view of each individual causal factor. In this paper, the authors proposed an approach based on system thinking and system dynamics to analyse the safety of a social-technical system. The case study of a tram accident is simple enough for the purpose of demonstrating its feasibility and benefits. The comparison with fault tree analysis was conducted, but it was not for the evaluation of the authors' approach. The real evaluation comes from the extensive applications in real world.
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Availability:
- Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/isbn/9780784481257
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Supplemental Notes:
- © 2018 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Corporate Authors:
American Society of Civil Engineers
1801 Alexander Bell Drive
Reston, VA United States 20191-4400 -
Authors:
- Zhang, Yadong
- Ge, Xiaocheng
- Yang, Wudong
- Guo, Jin
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Conference:
- First International Conference on Rail Transportation 2017
- Location: Chengdu Sichuan Provence, China
- Date: 2017-7-10 to 2017-7-12
- Publication Date: 2018
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Web
- Pagination: pp 464-475
- Monograph Title: ICRT 2017: Railway Development, Operations, and Maintenance
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Case studies; Railroad safety; Systems analysis
- Subject Areas: Railroads; Safety and Human Factors;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01869745
- Record Type: Publication
- ISBN: 9780784481257
- Files: TRIS, ASCE
- Created Date: Jan 11 2023 5:03PM