REGISTER

Steven Boldeman

BEng, MEc JMD

Railtech

Within the last decade, Systems Engineering has been used with more and more industries, and has been adopted within the rail industry. This paper discusses the reality of practice for systems engineering in Australia, and in particular for the rail industry. Systems engineering is a relatively new field in Australia for rail and the application of the field to the rail industry is developing and improving as time progresses. There have been hard lessons.

The paper notes several realities for the practice of systems engineering, the high amount of review, the rush for production of documentation, the focus on specific types of documents, and the need for high quality grammar and presentation for documentation. This paper provides some indication of the time and the hours required to complete a variety of different documents as an example to demonstrate the rush to produce documentation.

The paper also notes the strengths and weaknesses for SESA (Systems Engineering Safety Assurance) for the rail industry, and notes the heavy focus on SiD (Safety in Design) processes, and particularly hazard workshops. The application of these techniques has resulted in a very successful transfer of design activities to the private sector that has been embraced across almost all of Australia. The uptake of more exotic areas of SESA, such as RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety) or systems modelling has not been as rapid, and there remains a lot to be done in this area.