Project

Risk assessment of freight car safety inspection system

Interested in introducing new safety-inspection procedures in order to more efficiently detect damage to safety-relevant freight car components, SBB Cargo commissioned EBP to compare the effectiveness of the envisioned inspection procedure to that of the existing procedure.

The procedures that are implemented to secure the safe transportation of freight include the inspection of safety-relevant freight-car components, the detection of deviations from target states and the introduction of any necessary corrective measures.

The aim of the project is to compare the effectiveness of the current system for freight-car inspection, which relies on the work of technical inspectors at loading sites, to that of a number of variants for a proposed system when it comes to overall risk minimization. While the new system relies extensively on the computer-screen analysis of images transmitted from cameras installed at key railway locations (e.g. classification yards), it also includes a consideration of data gathered at train monitoring installations.

The results of our risk assessment indicate that the use of the new inspection system would provide a degree of freight-transportation safety that is at least as high as that of the system that is currently in place.

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