Improving Human Reliability Analysis for Railway Systems Using Fuzzy Logic

The International Union of Railway provides an annually safety report highlighting that human factor is one of the main causes of railway accidents every year. Consequently, the study of human reliability is fundamental, and it must be included within a complete reliability assessment for every railway-related system. However, currently RARA (Railway Action Reliability Assessment) is the only approach available in literature that considers human task specifically customized for railway applications. The main disadvantages of RARA are the impact of expert’s subjectivity and the difficulty of a numerical assessment for the model parameters in absence of an exhaustive error and accident database. This manuscript introduces an innovative fuzzy method for the assessment of human factor in safety-critical systems for railway applications to address the problems highlighted above. Fuzzy logic allows to simplify the assessment of the model parameters by means of linguistic variables more resemblant to human cognitive process. Moreover, it deals with uncertain and incomplete data much better than classical deterministic approach and it minimizes the subjectivity of the analyst evaluation. The output of the proposed algorithm is the result of a fuzzy interval arithmetic, $\alpha$ -cut theory and centroid defuzzification procedure. The proposed method has been applied to the human operations carried out on a railway signaling system. Four human tasks and two scenarios have been simulated to analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm. Finally, the results of the method are compared with the classical RARA procedure underline compliant results obtain with a simpler, less complex and more intuitive approach

Maintainability improvement using allocation methods for railway systems

An optimal maintenance policy is an essential condition of many industrial products in order to save resources and to minimize operational costs and system downtime. Some maintenance actions (e.g.CM, PM and CBM) are illustrated in the first part of the paper. The paper focuses on maintainability allocation techniques: four procedures are analyzed (Failure Rate-based allocation method; Trade-off of failure rate and design feature-based allocation method; Fuzzy maintainability allocation based on interval analysis; Time characteristic-based MA model). The traditional procedures are characterized by several drawbacks; therefore the attention is focalized on the time characteristic-based method, which turned out to be the best and the most complete procedure because it exceeds the others methods limitations. The last part of the paper proposes a case study analyzed using the techniques implemented in the MA optimal method. Two different cases are studied: they differ for the objective Mean Time To Repair, initially the requirement could vary inside a range, then it is fixed to the value 6 hours

Torsion pendulum facility for direct force measurements of LISA GRS related disturbances

A four mass torsion pendulum facility for testing of the LISA GRS is under development in Trento. With a LISA-like test mass suspended off-axis with respect to the pendulum fiber, the facility allows for a direct measurement of surface force disturbances arising in the GRS. We present here results with a prototype pendulum integrated with very large-gap sensors, which allows an estimate of the intrinsic pendulum noise floor in the absence of sensor related force noise. The apparatus has shown a torque noise near to its mechanical thermal noise limit, and would allow to place upper limits on GRS related disturbances with a best sensitivity of 300 fN/Hz^(1/2) at 1mHz, a factor 50 from the LISA goal. Also, we discuss the characterization of the gravity gradient noise, one environmental noise source that could limit the apparatus performances, and report on the status of development of the facility.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of the 6th International LISA Symposium, AIP Conference Proceedings 200

Entangled Two-Dimensional Coordination Networks: A General Survey

Many of the reported species exhibit the intriguing feature of interpenetration or other types of entanglements. The properties of these materials are related not only to their molecular structures but also to the topology of the individual networks as well as to the way in which the individual nets are entangled. Different synthetic procedures have been developed to attain a certain control of entanglement in coordination networks, and recently some reviews have appeared that are focused on factors governing the entanglements, having in mind their potential applications. However, these analyses are mostly devoted to 3D networks thanks to the great wealth of data on interpenetration. Simplification of a network that contains 2-loops can lead to complete disappearance of the entanglement, and therefore such networks were picked out into a separate group