Development of an economic eva‎luation model for risk reduction measures in rail and road level crossings using the ALARP model

7/8/2024 12:00:00 AM

Establishing and maintaining safety in the rail transportation industry is one of the main goals of the Islamic Republic of Iran Railways. In this regard, in order to protect the health and lives of people, various tools can be used, among which the risk management system is an effective tool. Effectively, it identifies potential risks and conditions for causing accidents and incidents, eva‎luates them, and after analysis removes or reduces the risk caused by hazards. In risk management, the identified risks should be compared with an acceptable criterion for risk and a decision should be made about them. Therefore, the existence of a criterion to measure the state of existing risks seems necessary. By referring to various sources, it was found that the level of acceptable risk in different societies is different according to cultural, economic, political, etc. conditions, therefore, in this research, a nationalized model of risk acceptance level has been developed. For this purpose, the main principles that were used in deriving these criteria were obtained and according to the conditions and priorities in the railway, it was determined that ALARP-based risk assessment models are acceptable according to the division of risk into three levels. Tolerable, acceptable and unacceptable and applying the cost-benefit approach based on the life quality index (LQI) for the risks in the tolerable range were chosen for implementation in the railway transportation. In order to extract the limits of the above model, the historical data of recorded incidents in the railways and the bootstrapping method were used. In order to implement the above model of road and rail level crossings, the Northern Railway region selected and based on the frequency of the most accidents at the crossing, the entrance of the Gurji Kala village was chosen as a case study. Therefore, the necessity of taking measures to improve safety was investigated by performing a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed local model and it was found that the removal of the level crossing is not justifiable, but it is justified to equip the crossing with a hedge.

Niloofar Faraji

Hamidreza Ahadi