ABSTRACT
Improving railway service reliability is one of the main objectives for the rail industry. The railway is essentially a series system and as such it is in itself unreliable, even when all of the elements achieve high reliability. Fault tolerance is the key property required of complex systems to achieve a high level of reliability. Although the railway system is not currently designed to be fault tolerant, many of the railway lines have some potential opportunities to incorporate some degree of redundancy. This paper presents a methodology based on a whole system approach aimed at investigating new design options to bring about some form of redundancy into the network in order to provide more diversionary paths to trains when failures occur or sections of track are taken out for maintenance. Simulation, optimization and failure modeling techniques are combined for an integrated assessment of different solutions to reveal the most effective railway system.
