REGISTER

Steven Boldeman           

BEng, MEc MIEAust CPEng NER      
JMD Railtech                                      

Richard Mifsud

 BE Elec, Master of Eng Prac, FIRSE

JMD Railtech

Generally all signalling designs are required to be assured before they are issued to clients. This assurance process has been deployed for many years, and typically consists of detailed technical reviews and independent checking. This process is different from the current legislated safety assurance process that is deployed for different rail infrastructure operators. Safety and systems assurance has a clear and defined process for the review of any design output to assure relevant safety issues have been identified and managed appropriately.

This paper reviews and discusses the differences and similarities between these two processes.

Broadly, the signalling design engineering assurance process is a review of the standards, presentation and scope compliance, of a design. This review is not intended to be limited in any way, is broad, and conducted by expert senior signalling staff. This review may result in recommendations to change the design or provide further information or documentation.

Safety assurance is a process designed to ensure that the design is safe to be implemented and is composed of many activities focused on the assurance of safety. This can include a variety of different risk assessment processes, as well as the management of design requirements. Safety assurance reviews are not focused on the review of the design, or the quality of the design. Rather safety assurance processes and reviews focus on specific processes, designed to assist with the quality of the design process in managing all aspects of safety arising out of the proposed infrastructure change.

The design engineering assurance process and the safety assurance process appear to be significantly overlapping processes but in reality they are subtly different processes achieving different goals. So how are they similar and how do they differ and more importantly what value does each process add to ensuring the ultimately built system achieves it end goals?