Modelling confidence in railway safety case

Abstract

Railway standard EN50129 clarifies the safety acceptance conditions of safety-related electronic systems for signalling. It requires using a structured argumentation, named Safety Case, to present the fulfilment of these conditions. As guidance for building the Safety Case, this standard provides the structure of high-level safety objectives and the recommendations of development techniques according to different Safety Integrity Levels (SIL). Nevertheless, the rationale connecting these techniques to the high-level safety objectives is not explicit. The proposed techniques stem from experts belief in the effectiveness and efficiency of these techniques to achieve the underlying safety objectives. So, how should one formalize and assess this belief? And as a result how much confidence can we have in the safety of railway systems when these standards are used? To deal with these questions, the paper successively addresses two aspects: (1) making explicit the safety assurance rationale by modelling the Safety Case with GSN (Goal Structuring Notation) according to EN5012x standards; (2) proposing a quantitative framework based on Dempster-Shafer theory to formalize and assessing the confidence in the Safety Case. A survey amongst safety experts is carried out to estimate the confidence parameters. With these results, an application guidance of this framework is provided based on the Wheel Slide Protection (WSP) system.