RAMS Analysis for Railway Engineering

Proper Safety Analysis for Reliable and Safe Rail Engineering

TÜV Rheinland keeps your rail operations in compliance with new and ever-changing regulations through services such as our railroad RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety) analysis program. Our experts evaluate the components of the railway to determine its compliance with the standard and the numerous requirements for RAMS certification. Railway RAMS analysis has become a necessity in many locations throughout the world, and TÜV Rheinland works with companies in numerous countries to develop efficient solutions for meeting the requirements of the standard.

Benefits at a Glance

With an assessment of your safety management system and RAMS analysis from TÜV Rheinland you can:

  • Fulfill the requirements of domestic and international safety and quality standards for rail engineering
  • Get comprehensive, industry standard guidelines for the design of your safety systems
  • Obtain cost-effective and efficient solutions for your electronics, software, mechanical, hydraulic, and other components and partial systems
  • Benefit from our broad experience in the implementation of hazard prevention measures
  • Take advantage of RAMS inspection results in many fields of application besides rail engineering using a concentrated collection of the right know-how and appropriate software tools

Our Services for Safety and Quality of Rail Engineering

For certification procedures, our experts offer a multitude of services designed to help you fulfill the requirements of safety and quality standards. These include:

  • Assessment and issuing of analysis and documents
  • Consulting services for systems security architecture
  • Consequence Tree Analysis
  • Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA)
  • Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)
  • Hazard Log
  • HAZOP (Hazard Operability Study)
  • Interface Hazard Analysis (Zonal Analysis)
  • Preliminary Hazard Analysis (PHA)
  • Safety evidence in compliance with DIN EN 50126, DIN EN 50128, and DIN EN 50129 norms
  • Subsystem Hazard Analysis
  • Secure information transmission processes such as the DIN EN 50159 norm
  • Maintainability Analysis

Advantages of RAMS Analysis

RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety) analysis is becoming increasingly important, and has become a requirement for certification procedures. Based on earlier forms of rail engineering, there was only one initial safety requirement – that a component was either relevant for safety or not. No secondary safety inspection would be carried out. However, today, according to CENELEC standards, the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standards, rail systems are to be inspected on the basis of RAMS analysis based on compliance with the definable safety steps: Safety Integrity Level (SIL). This demands a high level of technical system knowledge, coupled with experience in the field of statistic and probability theory analysis.

Possible Fields of Application for RAMS Analysis

  • Rail engineering: conventional wheel and track systems, automatic driverless systems, maglev technology, train guiding systems, signaling systems
  • Aerospace technology: audit systems for airplane components
  • Nucleonics
  • Control technology
  • Electrical supply networks
  • Street vehicles
  • Telematics, for example, toll collection systems
  • Military technology