Operational risk assessment of railway remote driving system

Abstract

The level of automation in transportation systems is steadily on the rise, particularly in railways. However, this increase in automation implies a review of the previously established safety assessments, safety cases, and safety principles. Concretely, to ensure the overall safety of automated systems, it is crucial to provide conclusive assurance not only for their functional systems but also for any potential operational interactions that may arise unexpectedly. In this paper, we propose a risk assessment method to deal with the operational safety of the remote driving of freight trains. The established approach is based on the GAME principle (i.e. the French safety principle ‘Globally at least equivalent’), which tends to assure the non-regression of the railway safety level. Firstly, the approach aims to perform a risk gap analysis with respect to driver’s handbook procedures to identify the (operational) hazards and dangerous situations/scenarios generated by remote driving on the rail system. This analysis is completed by the identification of hazards due to the fact that the remote driving is not able to fully comply with the requirements of the driver’s handbook. Then, the methodology is used to identify the risk control measures and the safety requirements to meet safety targets (i.e. maintaining the safety level at least equivalent to that obtained so far with in-cab driver). The obtained results are presented and structured in a table inspired by the preliminary operational hazards analysis (P-OHA) process.

Keywords:

• Railway safety
• operational risk assessment
• train remote driving
• autonomous trains
• risk assessment and hazard analysis

Acknowledgements

This work has been carried out in the framework of the TC-Rail project co-financed by a French public and private consortium (Railenium, SNCF, Thales, Actia Telecom, CNES).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The decree of 19 March 2012 (Consolidated version as of 20/04/2020).

2 Société nationale des chemins de fer français—French Public Sector Undertaking for National Railways.

3 As part of the TC-Rail project, remote driving will continue to be provided by conventional conductors.

4 ANSSI, EBIOS. “EBIOS-Expression of Needs and Identification of Safety Objectives.” (2016).

5 By safety element, we mean the requirements of an article of the Driver’s Handbook that is pertinent to safety.

6 Such as list of railway safety events proposed in the decree of 4 January 2016 relating to the nomenclature of railway safety events classification.