Application of Fuzzy FMEA to Indian Railway Signalling Systems

The paper deals with the failure analysis of railway signalling systems, in general, and Indian Railway signalling systems, in particular. It is worth mentioned that failure of railway signalling subsystems and systems hampers the safe running of rolling stock and thus, sometime reduces productivity. Both traditional and fuzzy logic-based failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) are considered here to analyse the railway signalling failures. It is observed that on the basis of risk priority numbers (RPN) of railway signalling subsystem’s failure, fuzzy logic-based FMEA is better than the traditional FMEA. Also, one hundred and twenty five rules have been generated with the help of fuzzy logic-based FMEA by considering different levels of severity, occurrence, and detectability. Twenty rules out of one hundred and twenty five are taken into account as very significant as far as operation and failure analysis of signalling system is concerned. KeywordFMEA, Fuzzy Logic, Railway Signalling Systems, RPN __________________________________________________________________________________________________