The aim of Systems Assurance is to ensure that railway systems meet requirements for Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS).
Systems Assurance plays a vital role in rail Safety Assurance by ensuring that complex systems perform reliably and, when they fail, they do so in a safe and controlled manner, and are quickly and safely reinstated.
Within the European Union, EN 50126 provides rail regulators and the industry with a systematic approach to managing ‘RAMS’ for rail systems through a process of defining requirements, verifying that these will be met as the design is developed and validating that they have been achieved during testing and commissioning.
Rail Safety & Systems Assurance helps system developers understand and apply EN 50126 to their projects, and integrate it into the safety acceptance/approvals process. This approach relies upon a systematic analysis of the risks and demonstration that these have either been mitigated through the design or transferred to the operator.