Application of evidential networks in quantitative analysis of railway accidents

Abstract

Currently, a high percentage of accidents in railway systems are accounted to human factors. As a consequence, safety engineers try to take into account this factor in risk assessment. However, human reliability data are very difficult to quantify, thus, qualitative methods are often used in railway system’s risk assessments. Modeling of human errors through probabilistic approaches has shown some limitation concerning the quantification of qualitative aspects of human factors. The proposed article presents an original method to account for the human factor by using evidential networks and fault tree analysis.