System for Investigation of Railway Interfaces

This paper describes a system for the investigation of railway interfaces that is under development within the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB). Going through its preliminary stages at the time of writing, the target is to adopt this method as a formal part of the standards development and review process that RSSB manages on behalf of the mainline railway operators in GB. Although the work described in this paper has been and continues to be fully supported by RSSB, any views expressed in this paper are those of the author alone, and should not be interpreted as a statement of policy. Assessing the safety of complex systems is of vital importance to stakeholders in many industry sectors, such as railway transportation, aviation and other industries, where there is a likelihood that accidents can happen. These accidents may result in loss of lives and/or cause damage to property and the environment. This paper presents a proactive approach on how to assess, achieve and maintain safety, integrity and performance of complex systems using a soft systems thinking approach. Causal reasoning of potential accident scenarios in an objective manner requires an irreducible concept, which everyone can agree upon. This is known as a hazard in the case of potential accident scenarios. To identify hazard(s) and reason about them, we need an objective description of the operational system. However, an operational system is a complex system. Complex system(s) are defined as integrated composites of components of people, processes, assets, procedures, rules, and organisations.