• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.458-465
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• 2017

The railway signaling system, which controls the course of trains and the distance between trains, is a safety critical system of the railway system because derailment or collision of trains can occur if unsafe failure is generated by any fault. The international standards of reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety of railway applications require that the safety of functions be guaranteed in safety critical systems; system reliability and safety are quantitatively estimated and demonstrated by the failure rates of devices. The development of technology has accelerated the development of railway signaling systems. Existing devices, which have already been verified as to their safety, are applied with special user requirements to reflect the new operation scenario. It is found that the reliability and safety of the devices are different depending on individual application. Therefore, the reliability of the railway signaling system must be considered while complying with the international standards; this requires that the initial failure rate be estimated and demonstrated using fault data gathered over several years. This paper shows a method for demonstrating the initial estimated failure rate and suggests a fault data collection method and an overall process that is based on probability.