A Study of Railway Signaling System Design Method through Requirement Analysis and Integrated Life Cycle Cost Evaluation

Abstract

The railway signaling system should be optimized in accordance with requirements such as maintainability, cost effectiveness, safety, reliability and availability. That optimization, however, tends not to be sufficient necessarily due to its complexities and existing system design methods in the railway signaling field. To resolve this insufficiency, therefore, we propose top-down requirement analysis and integrated life cycle cost evaluation as a new method of the system design. In our method, various indexes of requirement are to be converted into the life cycle cost to enable us to evaluate offspring of various system designs from the appropriate viewpoint. To improve economics of construction for the Shinkansen network expansion, we intend to apply the method of system design of the Shinkansen signaling and to prove that it is effective in all of railway signaling system areas including existing lines. There is no precedent for this kind of methodology in the area of Japanese railway signaling systems. This paper introduces the proposed method with procedures of the requirement analysis and results of the integrated life cycle cost evaluation.