The Risk Model for Hazards Generated at Level Crossings

The current operating conditions as well as the development of road and railway transport cause a significant number of dangerous events to be generated on the interfaces of the road and railway systems. This particularly applies to level crossings, as their large quantity (in Poland there are about 14 000 of them) additionally affects the scale of the problem. Such a state requires taking formal actions in the field of risk management in these analyses domains. One of such activities is the development and application of an appropriate risk model for estimating and evaluating the risk of hazards. The analysis of the literature on this issue indicates that in other countries outside Poland, many such models have been developed and applied. This work presents a risk model adequate to the functioning conditions of level crossings in Poland. For its development, generic risk model based on many criteria and integrating the resulting components of the overall risk metrics was used. As part of the developed model, an original set of criteria for estimating the risk of hazards was established and described in detail. The processes of preparing the components of the overall risk metrics that result from the established risk analysis criteria were discussed. Among others, experts’ knowledge, National Reference Value and National Investigation Body reports were used. The final result of the work is the presentation of a formal risk model which meets the requirements for risk estimation and evaluation in the entities of the European Union railway system. The user interface of a program which is a computer implementation of the risk model algorithm was presented. According to the authors of the paper, the developed model is consistent with the knowledge, intuition and experience of people responsible for safety management at level crossings.