Railway Reliability and Safety Modeling – Research Results in Terms of the Markov Approach

In this paper, the author’s research work is focused on modeling of railway transportation system’s reliability and safety. The paper begins with an introduction related to a literature review on railway transportation system functionality, reliability and safety modeling. Functional model of the railway transportation system can be shown as a process described by a set of states. The set can be divided into a specified number of subsets. Reliability analysis of the system should of course begin with examination of availability variation. It is important to differentiate between the system ability to carry out transpor tation tasks and reliable operation of system components. A proper state description requires consideration of additional features. Such a feature may be consequences of incorrect operation of system components. In addition to the technical effects associated with incorrect operation of system components there may be mentioned traffic consequences (traffic disruptions). Traffic disruptions are mainly related to execution time and route used for implementation of transportation tasks. Another important parameter for defining of system states bases on the traffic dependencies between trains running in the system. The defined states were used for reliability and safety modeling of the railway transportation system. The paper ends with validation results of the model, based on a simplified 29 states model and a few information about realized operation research. IndexTerms railway, reliability, safety, model.