Interdisciplinary safety analysis of complex socio-technological systems based on the Functional Resonance Accident Model: An application to railway traffic supervision. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, 2011, 96, pp. AbstractThis paper presents an application of Functional Resonance Accident Models (FRAM) for the safety analysis of complex socio-technological systems, i.e. systems which include not only technological, but also human and organizational components. The supervision of certain industrial domains provides a good example of such systems, because although more and more actions for piloting installations are now automatized, there always remains a decision level (at least in the management of degraded modes) involving human behavior and organizations. The field of application of the study presented here is railway traffic supervision, using modern Automatic Train Supervision (ATS) systems. Examples taken from railway traffic supervision irrelevant information likely to distract operators).

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The new generation of supervision systems in industry can achieve operation from display process variables to all automated control where the human is just the monitoring automaton. In the railway specific industry, supervision is organised in switching zones and aims to be centralised in an Integrated Control Centre. Such centres implement integrated and computer based systems that perform train protection, train operation and supervision. Thus railway dispatchers using supervision have their tasks considerably simplified. Although considered today as not safety critical, railway supervision systems can contribute to safety in some scenarios where an appropriate decision of a supervision operator could notably reduce the severity of accidents. That is in particular the case for residual scenarios (intervention of maintenance teams on the tracks, manual operation of trains not protected by train protection system, coupling/uncoupling, emergency requiring the stopping and evacuation of a train etc) only covered by procedure, thus requiring human intervention by a person supposed correctly informed on the state of the system, thanks to the data provided by the supervision system.