Railway Safety Analysis: Trends and Challenges

Abstract

Rail transport has been changing the mobility of people. The Railway's development has pointed the focus on the safety management of trains and infrastructure, particularly related to passengers. This paper focuses on the methods adopted to guarantee high safety in railways; for this reason, it was interesting to present a literature analysis about this topic. The authors short-listed 48 articles for indepth analysis. Bibliometric research and a thorough literature assessment were conducted to evaluate the safety management in the Railway area. Today, the attention of experts and railway managers is very high on high-speed railways because of their high-risk levels. For this reason, many advanced technologies have been developing all over the World, thanks to the new artificial intelligence tools and machine learning, to guarantee a constantly high degree of safety. Especially the stations and specifically, the platform zones, are crucial hotspots for railway accidents, particularly suicide events. Some prevention techniques showed an increment in safety quality and made Railway the safest transport infrastructure. So, a resilient model applied to safety railways could improve even more substantial safety degree.