Abstract
In order to assess a railway safety technology, it is required to examine, among other criteria, the efficiency of the technology. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze causes of rail accidents to quantify the risks and furthermore, to reduce them if is possible. Because of this topicality, an important component of risk evaluation is the economic allocation of train accident damage costs. In other words these allocations enable to calculate the value of preventing a casualty (VPC) or to justify safety technology investments. One objective of the article is to present a method for analyzing past accidents, their causes and to allocate them to the corresponding accident category. This method should help to justify investments in the safety infrastructure. The accident reports of the National Investigation Bodies (NIB) and the information of databases like the European Railway Agency Database of Interoperability and Safety (ERADIS) or the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)-Database of the United States, which are partially based on these reports, were used for the examination of the relevant accidents. In addition to the common known UIC categorization of accident causes, a third level of accident causes were added to evaluate the accidents accurately enough. So accident causes can be allocated to the equivalent safety technology. This method of allocation is described in the paper. For testing the hypothesis, that a allocation of accident causes and safety technology is possible with this method, the method was used as example for the analyzes of the hot box detection technology. The results of the evaluation support the assumption. It is possible, based on the analyzed accident information, to find out and to examine the relevant accidents causes for the related safety technology and to calculate the costs of these specific accidents.
