Common Safety Targets Research Articles

AN APPROACH TO THE LEGAL REQUIREMENTS REGARDING RAILWAY TRANSPORT SAFETY MONITORING IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

The targeted liberalisation of the European Union railway market in 1998 could have lead to a decrease in the safety of rail transport. To prevent this, the European Commission developed and implemented new requirements in this area without explicitly deciding on the methods and tools to be used for their implementation. Entities operating in the market faced a new challenge, the development of a systems model approach to safety management. Only a correctly designed process model, along with the appropriate tools for monitoring and managing risk, allows the level of safety to be maintained at current levels or improved. As part of the research, solutions were developed for a systems approach to safety management in railway transport and the risk management and maintenance monitoring of railway vehicles. Safety is an essential criterion for assessing the functioning of a railway system, it determines its efficiency as well as – in a widely understood sense – the quality of its transport services. This paper describes the legal requirements and practical methods of implementation arising from the issue of Directive 2004/49/EC as it concerns the monitoring of railway safety (Chruzik et al. 2014). The directive enforces the gradual introduction of Common Safety Targets (CST) and Common Safety Methods (CSM) to maintain (or increase) the existing high safety levels after the opening up (liberalisation) of the rail market. The introduction of CST and CSM necessitates the development of methods for the evaluation of the level of safety and activity of operators, both at the level of the Member States and also at the level of the European Union. The paper describes the practical solutions developed for railway operators as part of the implementation of maintenance management systems (Sitarz et al. 2013; Chruzik et al. 2014).

Modern regulations of safety assurance for maglev transportation

In article regulatory framework of maglev are considered, the international experience is analysed and conclusions for Russian practice are drawn. Modern management methods of safety of transport systems are based on principles of advance to occurrence of dangerous events. These principles include: - application of forecasting methods (aprioristic estimation methods) at an estimation of safety and substantiation of safety measures - a principle of «the new approach»; - estimation of safety taking into account risk from action of casual and systematic failures; - safety management in a complex with management of reliability, availability, maintainability, material support and life cycle cost. Necessity of application of «the new approach» to railway safety, including the high-speed railways, formally has been established by the Railway Safety Directive 2004/49/EC. This Directive orders to use: - analysis and management of risk at all life cycle stages of the technical systems participating in formation of traffic service, and at early stages of life cycle are made look-ahead estimations of risks which are compared with admissible values of risk; - common safety targets, common safety indicators and common safety methods on all space of the European Union; - common approaches to certification of safety and the harmonised supervision bodies; - common typical safety management system, based on ISO 9001principles. For activity expansion on performance of Railway Safety Directive of the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization CENELEC have been developed and now frame standards EN 50126, EN 50128, EN 50129 are applied.

Derivation Of Common Safety TargetsFor The European Railways

Revitalizing the railways is a top priority of the European Union’s common transport policy. A declared objective is to aim towards the creation of a homogeneous European Railway that should help increase the share of railway traffic throughout Europe. At the moment the technical and operational fragmentation between the different Member States are seen as main obstacles to the competitiveness of railway transport, not only for cross-border operations, but also with Member states as it may hinder competition for the provision of railway services. Such considerations have led recently to the development of common solutions (i.e. ERTMS/ETCS for signaling) as well as to common technical specifications to allow interoperability (i.e. TSIs for high-speed and conventional railways). It is recognized that his drive towards interoperability also needs to be accompanied by some convergence in safety practices across Member States. This is meant on the one hand to maintain a high level of safety on the whole European railway network, and on the other hand to facilitate access to new entrants wishing to offer services in any country. The so-called Safety Directive has recently been adopted by the European Parliament and is intended to provide a common framework for achieving such a convergence. Among other provisions, the Safety Directive requires the gradual introduction of Common Safety targets. These will have to eventually be proposed for adoption by the new European Railway Agency. Common Safety Targets is a sensitive issue, hence the need for a large consensus building currently ongoing. This paper will present some aspects of the discussion that took place on this subject in the European Research project SAMRAIL. Emphasis is placed upon the various ways the Common Safety Targets could be defined and set.