Artificial neural network for violation analysis

Barrier removal (BR) is a safety-related violation, and it can be analyzed in terms of benefits, costs, and potential deficits. In order to allow designers to integrate BR into the risk analysis during the initial design phase or during re-design work, we propose a connectionist method integrating self-organizing maps (SOM). The basic SOM is an artificial neural network that, on the basis of the information contained in a multi-dimensional space, generates a space of lesser dimensions. Three algorithms—Unsupervised SOM, Supervised SOM, and Hierarchical SOM—have been developed to permit BR classification and prediction in terms of the different criteria. The proposed method can be used, on the one hand, to foresee/predict the possibility level of a new/changed barrier (prospective analysis), and on the other hand, to synthetically regroup/rearrange the BR of a given human–machine system (retrospective analysis). We applied this method to the BR analysis of an experimental railway simulator, and our preliminary results are presented here.