Author(s)

JEROME MAGOUET, MATTHIEU PERIN, SIMON COLLART-DUTILLEUL

Abstract

Railway accidents are rare, but for the sake of safety improvement they are all investigated by experts. Whereas this solution has proven its correctness to increase the overall safety in transportation, the lack of a methodological analysis formalization in case of similar accidents may lead to the non-detection of common root causes and to forfeit their removals. The aim of this work is to propose a formalized taxonomy based on the accident causes, classified by main categories such as “technical causes”, “human causes” or “organizational causes”. This classification is then used as a seed for safety analysis, like fault tree analysis, to detect and quantify possible common root causes for similar railway accidents. Along with this paper, the methodology is exemplified on a specific accident type: the derailments caused by over-speed in curves.

Keywords

taxonomy, railway, accident, root causes, fault tree analysis