Some specific activities at the railway signalling system development

Abstract

The paper presents authors' opinions on some essential activities related to the interlocking system development. The safety of electronic systems is based on other principles than for the relay systems. That means it is necessary even to change the approach to their safety function definition and safety evaluation. The risk taken by a person using the railway transport should be similar or independent of the country of occurrence. For a signalling system to be acceptable it is not enough to state only the goal fulfilment but it is even mandatory to prove the decrease of the risk to the minimal acceptable level. Objectification of the safety function definition process for signalling systems is very problematic nowadays. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.