SIGNAL+DRAHT | Issue 07-08/2012
Ranking of important components in railway systems – comparison of two probabilistic graphical models
Component Importance Measure (CIM) can be useful in improving design, operation and maintenance of a railway system. This article discussed a number of CIM and their computation using Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Bayesian Networks (BNs). Both the methods were able to compute the CIM for a specific safety problem from railway industry. The application of BNs to railway industry is novel and the additional benefits in using BNs are that they model joint distributions (dependencies) of random variables (system components) in a compact and flexible way.