Integral approach to assessing the criticality of railway infrastructure elements

Abstract

In the last ten years, considerable attention has been paid to analysing and assessing the criticality of railway infrastructure elements. Publications on the subject mostly assess elements only from a certain point of view, such as purpose, reliability or risk. This leads to only a partial assessment of criticality without continuous correlation, which may result some critical elements of the system being omitted. The article introduces the railway infrastructure criticality assessment tool (RICA tool), which was created to evaluate the criticality of railway infrastructure elements in all aspects. The integral approach of the tool lies in comprehensively assessing the technical and process factors of rail transport. The criticality of railway infrastructure elements is therefore assessed not only in terms of the relevance and resilience of elements but also their interdependence, substitutability, risk and impact.