A method of railway system safety analysis based on cusp catastrophe model

Abstract

For rail transit systems, safety is one of the most important goals that need to be guaranteed. We build a method of railway system safety analysis based on the cusp catastrophe model. This method describes the continuous changing process of railway system safety and considers the emergent property of safety. This method solves the problem that the outputs of most static analysis methods of railway system safety do not have continuity and avoids the complex analysis process and heavy computation burden brought by using some dynamic models such as state transition models. The quantitative case study of the continuous changing process of system safety in the evolution process of the Yong-Wen railway accident shows that the visualized outputs obtained by using this method are consistent with the actual situation. This method has the potential to be applied in the real-time monitoring of railway system safety and the early warning of train accidents.