In order to define tools and methods useful to the project and management of the reliability of complex systems in built environment – whose vulnerability can cause serious risks –a study was developed on a highly complex system: the railway transport, of which it is here presented a synthesis of the conceptual contents and methodology. The choice of such an application field was due to the growing criticism of the safety theme within a context more and more characterized by tensions resulting from a managing policy strongly conditioned by expense restraint, with serious consequences not only in terms of service quality decrease. There’s indeed a growing demand for safety in railway transportation, in particular in its fundamental aspects: safety in operation (prevention of those risks resulting from train circulation and their movements), workers’ safety (prevention of accidents), users’ safety. Railway transportation is therefore a sector with an urgent need of rigorous tools for determining intervention priorities by means of which to be able to plan the maintenance activities to focus the available resources on. Railway system is a complex system not only because of its size but also because of the amount of technical components and actors involved, as well as because of the variability of its context (orography, climate, use intensity and modes, ecc); in consideration of this complexity, it has been considered indispensable to activate systemic processes of understanding, regulation and control, based on the detection of all the technological, human and environmental components as well as of the relationships among each other. In our study, it was adopted as a model a specific tract, sufficiently representative of the overall system characteristics: the Vasto-Pescara tract. The fundamental assumption was to consider the railway system as a socio-technical one (man-machine-environment); the goal consisted in the improvement of the cybernetic capacities of the management and maintenance system, by means of tools to detect and evaluate risks and to determine those intervention modes useful to attain an overall improvement of the infrastructure quality and to optimize the resource use.
Programming of Maintenance and Safety in Railway Transportation. A Case Study on the Pescara-Vasto Tract
LADIANA, DANIELA
2006-01-01
Abstract
In order to define tools and methods useful to the project and management of the reliability of complex systems in built environment – whose vulnerability can cause serious risks –a study was developed on a highly complex system: the railway transport, of which it is here presented a synthesis of the conceptual contents and methodology. The choice of such an application field was due to the growing criticism of the safety theme within a context more and more characterized by tensions resulting from a managing policy strongly conditioned by expense restraint, with serious consequences not only in terms of service quality decrease. There’s indeed a growing demand for safety in railway transportation, in particular in its fundamental aspects: safety in operation (prevention of those risks resulting from train circulation and their movements), workers’ safety (prevention of accidents), users’ safety. Railway transportation is therefore a sector with an urgent need of rigorous tools for determining intervention priorities by means of which to be able to plan the maintenance activities to focus the available resources on. Railway system is a complex system not only because of its size but also because of the amount of technical components and actors involved, as well as because of the variability of its context (orography, climate, use intensity and modes, ecc); in consideration of this complexity, it has been considered indispensable to activate systemic processes of understanding, regulation and control, based on the detection of all the technological, human and environmental components as well as of the relationships among each other. In our study, it was adopted as a model a specific tract, sufficiently representative of the overall system characteristics: the Vasto-Pescara tract. The fundamental assumption was to consider the railway system as a socio-technical one (man-machine-environment); the goal consisted in the improvement of the cybernetic capacities of the management and maintenance system, by means of tools to detect and evaluate risks and to determine those intervention modes useful to attain an overall improvement of the infrastructure quality and to optimize the resource use.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
