Safety data for a transformed railway
We live in an increasingly data-rich and data-driven world. Digital systems and sensors generate vast amounts of data that we can use to improve how we manage safety. At the same time, we’ll continue to rely on rail staff to identify, report and interpret many safety events. But new technology will make this easier, and new tools and techniques will increase the value derived from the information.
Safety data and rail transformation
Trusted safety data is more important than ever as the railway goes through major change. Risk can be heightened during such periods, and the industry has learnt tragic lessons throughout its history about what happens when change is not well managed and focus on safety is lost. It is vital that the rail sector maintains a rich and consistent industry-wide data set to help ensure risk-based decisions are well founded and that the outcomes set out in the Great British Railways (GBR) White Paper can be delivered.
Crucial to this is maintaining the culture of reporting and openly sharing information on safety events that has developed alongside SMIS over the past 25 years. The industry structures and relationships on which this culture was built are changing, with the establishment of GBR and Passenger Services Contracts. Examples from the past show that commercial considerations and other pressures, whether real or perceived, can impact safety reporting and transparency. For example, RSSB’ carried out an independent review of RIDDOR reporting by Network Rail and its contractors in 2011. It identified that hundreds of lost time incidents had gone unreported over several years. This arose because of cultural issues and the unintended consequences of management initiatives intended to improve safety and procurement strategies and reduce costs and improve efficiency. We must – and will – manage similar risks as the sector transforms.
A bright future
The future looks bright. RSSB manages SMIS on behalf of the industry and, in its role as trusted broker, is well placed to navigate safety reporting through the challenge of sector reform. We will keep a sharp focus the SMIS Data Quality Programme to ensure that related decisions can be based on complete and accurate information.
We have also started to harness new technology so that data can be collected more efficiently and shared automatically between company systems and SMIS. Pilot projects are underway with three operators to establish the application programming interfaces (APIs) that will make this happen. Data can be input once and used for multiple purposes. Organisations will have the flexibility to develop reporting systems that align with their business processes while retaining a consistent source of cross-industry information and all the benefits this brings.
The work we’re doing to simplify the SMIS data model is an enabler for automatic data transfer and is also providing benefits in the present. By making it easier and quicker to enter data into the current SMIS system, rail operators have already saved over £100,000 of time.
At the same time, new tools, datasets and techniques have increased the value that can be extracted from the safety event information. Analysis can be more sophisticated, closer to real time and more granular than was the case even five years ago enabling better, more timely decisions that meet local need. Recent work to understand local risk from soil cutting failures in extreme rainfall (and the knock-on risk from mitigations like speed restrictions) demonstrates the power of combining different datasets and applying sophisticated modelling. RSSB’s new PIM dashboard, which tracks trends in train accident risk, provides users with much more scope to interact with and take local cuts of the most recent data than the previous static format.
So as GB rail looks back with justified pride at the risk and evidence-based approach to safety management that was boosted 25 years ago by the advent of SMIS, it is with confidence that the best is yet to come.
