Qualitative and Quantitative Safety Evaluation of Train Control Systems (CTCS) With Stochastic Colored Petri Nets

Abstract

Currently qualitative as well as quantitative safety analysis of railway systems are usually conducted through Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Event Tree Analysis (ETA). FTA and ETA display the causalities and consequences of hazards or accidents by means of linear event sequences, which makes it difficult to incorporate non-linear relationships such as feedback. The repair of failure system components is not considered in traditional FTA and ETA. Moreover, quantitative safety evaluation by FTA and ETA requires that failure events should be statistically independent. Considering these issues, we propose an approach of conducting qualitative as well as quantitative safety evaluation of the CTCS-3 with stochastic Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs). The hierarchical CPN model of the CTCS-3 takes the scenarios, movement of trains, the failure and repair of system components into account. The occurrence times of hazardous events of a CTCS-3 system is quantitatively evaluated with the numerical data collected during the simulation of the system model. The evaluation results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.