Optimization of safety system structures in railway transport

Abstract

One of the basic strategies for reacting to unacceptable risk is introducing new elements to the analyzed domain. These elements and the relations between them can be treated as a safety system. Although expanding the safety system usually reduces the risk of specific hazards, it often leads to new problems resulting from its excessive development: the system becomes costly and difficult to understand. One of the methods of avoiding the negative issues is to apply an approach described in this paper, which is based on an optimization method making use of the results of risk analysis. The article contains a detailed mathematical description of an optimal solution search algorithm, enabling the selection of a configuration of safety system components that will be the most appropriate in terms of the degree of risk reduction and the related costs. The theoretical part was supplemented with a working example concerning railway traffic control systems. Using the proposed method, it is possible to obtain an optimal structure of a safety system, ensuring at least a tolerated level of risk, adequate to the identified hazards.