This week, rail experts congregated in Sydney for RTSA's biennial Conference on Railway Excellence (CORE). With the conference theme of Rail: Smart, Automated, Sustainable, AMOG's Matthew Sorrensen delivered a paper and presentation on the "Challenges to Achieving Safety Compliance of Railway Tunnel Automated Systems."
In his presentation, Matthew addressed the Functional Safety and railway specific Industry Standards (including AS 61508, EN50126 (1 and 2), EN50128 and EN50129), the justification and prevention of the misuse of Safety Integrity Level (SILs), and system architecture and the design challenges of non-independent Safety Systems.
His key take-aways?
- Ensure Safety Integrity Levels are justified
- Implement an independent safety system (though there are options if this is not practical)
- Perform SIL verification as early as possible: delaying changes will only increase costs
- Higher SIL is not always better
If you would like more information, please contact AMOG and speak with a member of our Risk and Safety Engineering team. You can also read more about the #CORE2018 conference here.