Around the world, governments at all levels play very important roles in managing the safety of public transportation systems. Only in North America, however, do market forces (i.e., insurance and finance) play a bigger role than the public sector in both the construction and operation of public transportation systems. Here, risk management has a special meaning in both financial and legal terms. Public transportation "properties" work closely with government sponsors, insurance brokers, underwriters, and claim administrators in both managing and financing the risks. This long process involves the development of safety plans, standard compliance training, accident review, hazard analysis, risk mitigation, and legal action. Government regulation and insurance policy should be seen as two parallel tracks that together guide the safety improvement programs in rail and transit systems.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: 14

The railway safety in Korea is threatened due to the restructuring of the railway industries, introduction of the Korea Train eXpress (KTX) and electrification of the conventional lines. Many technical arrangements are to be improved to control railway accidents as low as reasonably practicable, such as a railway safety act, safety standards, and safety assessment infrastructures. With the support of the Korean government the Korea Railroad Research Institute (KRRI) is conducting an integrated R&D program for improvement of the railway safety, of which the target is to reduce the accident fatalities by half. The program is composed of three parts; the safety system engineering and the program management, the establishment of a safety management system, and the development of techniques for assessing and preventing major railway accidents. Details of the research programs are explained in this paper, where risk is used as the major control measure.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: 08

Complexity of new and modified railway systems increases with the application of modern systems technology. Such complexity must be assessed with respect to performance, safety and risk to assure achievement of stakeholder goals and the safety of the traveling public. The formal and rigorous application of 'systems engineering' techniques to modern rail projects provides a framework to eliminate some of the problems that have emerged in some of the more recent rail projects worldwide. These problems have led to delays in bringing projects into commercial revenue service.
Systems engineering provides a framework within which a total rail system can be developed to progressively assure an acceptably safe and, as far as is practicable, a low risk rail system that additionally achieves the specified performance criteria. This paper discusses some of the elements that should be applied within an overall systems engineering framework to add confidence in delivering a project not only to achieve the goals of the stakeholders and the customers, but also to assure high safety and minimal risk. It explores some of the areas in past projects that could have potentially benefited from the earlier application these formal techniques.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: Nil

Project Safety Review (PSR) is a safety certification process launched by the Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore in year 2000. Its objective is to provide a staged and robust check-and-balance process on safety assurance of new rapid transit system (RTS) projects. The PSR process also facilitates the certification of the overall system for a RTS project before the system is permitted to commence passenger service. Under the PSR process, a project is divided into 4 stages, namely concept, design, handover and operation. At each stage, a safety submission is required to be prepared and subject to an independent audit. When all the safety submissions are found to be satisfactory and together with the operator's declaration of its readiness to operate the system, the Chief Executive of LTA will give his consent to the operator to commence revenue service. This paper will give an overview of the PSR, its requirements, together with the challenges and lessons learned from its implementation.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: 03

Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006

The Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) group of Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (INER) has developed and maintains the PRA models of all the nuclear power plants (NPPs) for Taiwan Power Company over 20 years since PRA was first introduced to Taiwan's NPPs. These PRA models cover internal and external events, power operation and shutdown mode, with LERF (Large Early Release Frequency) calculation modules. The PRA group has also completed a dedicated risk monitor with indigenous model solver engines, which are now adopted by the domestic three NPPs to monitor daily operation risks. The second generation of the risk monitor, TIRM-2 (Taipower Integrated Risk Monitor-2) with calculation capabilities of LERF has been developed successfully in Taiwan. A window-based tool with the Significance Determination Process (SDP) context to help the resident inspectors of Taiwan's nuclear regulatory body to perform the Phase 2 SDP assessment of the Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) has also been completed. Recently, the approval of on-line maintenance of Residual Heat Removal (RHR) systems and acceptance of PRA peer review reports on all of the three Taiwan's operating NPPs have created a basis of risk-informed applications in Taiwan. A table-based SDP of the ROP has been provided by the USNRC to determine the safety significance of resident inspection findings. After a preliminary screening (the Phase 1 of SDP) of inspection findings, an assessment process is conducted to obtain a risk approximation and to help the inspectors determine the risk significance (the Phase 2 of SDP). INER has developed a window-based tool with the SDP context to help the resident inspectors perform the Phase 2 SDP assessment at power and obtain the associated results more quickly and precisely. In addition to the progress of the TIRM-2 and the window-based SDP tool, on-line maintenance of RHR systems for current three operating NPPs of TPC has been approved in October 2003. Dedicated PRA models mentioned above were established for all of the three nuclear plants by 1992. The third party, ABS Consulting of the United States and Professor George Apostolakis of MIT have reviewed the accomplished living PRA reports on all of the three Taiwan's operating NPPs in 2002. Taiwan's regulatory body has accepted the associated peer review reports in December 2003 and is well satisfied with the PRA quality. Other subsequent risk-informed applications will be proposed soon. A new era of risk-informed regulation and applications has been initiated in Taiwan's nuclear society.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: 14

Space developments have been built on tremendous numbers of failures in the past. Since space environments are very difficult to simulate on the ground, or space vehicles need very massive power to escape from the earth, space scientists and engineers have been solving "Unknown" technical factors derived from many analyses of the causes of failures. Space developments have confronted enormous "Risks." Therefore space community has been refining their technical and managerial processes in developments to conquer these risks. Risk management is the essential part of these activities. While lessons learned are typical examples that show the successor how past failures occurred and how these countermeasures were taken, and what were the results of them. It is very essential for organizations to sharpen their sensitivity to risks at the development. In most cases, the causes of failures are combination of technical and managerial defects in the process of developments. Nowadays space development has changed from science and technical adventure to business opportunities. Space community has to explore their way of development. Lessons learned is not only knowledge, but duties to prevent reoccurrence of similar kind of failures, that were extracted from past bitter experience. If lessons learned suggest correcting the technical and managerial process of developments, it will also improve risk management of the organization. Currently it is vital to link lessons learned to the risk management to keep brand value of the organization.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: 12

This article shows how a software development environment can be qualified according to the CENELEC railway application standards and to what extent the standards are adequate for such a task. The requirements for a software development platform are identified. But a software development environment also includes procedures, so the software quality assurance plan is also considered. Adherence to procedures and adequate qualification of involved personnel should also be demonstrated, but this is not specific for a software development environment, so it can be done separately. The method can be adapted to other application areas where similar standards are applicable.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: 13

Recent history is littered with companies that have had excellent risk management structures, and yet have fallen prey or have been exposed to huge losses as a result of a failure to manage risk. What causes this? Why does a good risk management structure and robust processes fail to deliver results? The aftermath of September 11 highlighted how emotions affect people's response to risk. Research has compared the effect on workers close to the site as similar to how refugees respond [1], has demonstrated the effect that anger and fear can have on risk judgments [2], and contends that people assets can only be harnessed by managing both intellectual capital (your peoples' knowledge) and emotional capital (the feelings, thoughts and emotions of your people) [3]. How can we engage these emotions so that we can move from a process (head) to a preference (heart) response and more importantly how can we have a practical and positive impact on our organisations Risk Management culture? In this paper David Smith examines these issues and provides an organisational risk management growth model as an answer to these questions.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: 18

The loss caused by railway accidents becomes larger as their technology advances such as the increase in the transportation capacity and speed. In Japanese railway history, most of the safety measures were devised after suffering severe railway accidents. This kind of retrospective approach to the safety cannot be effective for the development of a new railway system, and thus a proactive system approach to the safety problems such as PRA (Probabilistic Risk Assessment) is to be desired. Toward this goal, the identification of accident occurrence conditions leading to a severe accident is essential at the design stage. This paper tries to apply the concept of "safety control functions" to the evaluation of accident occurrence conditions in a conventional event tree/fault tree approach. A safety control function is composed of detection, diagnosis, and execution functions, each of which corresponds to a specific component function or human operator action. Using safety control functions, not only the event tree for a specific initiating event can be easily constructed, but also the failure probability of a safety control function can be evaluated systematically. A simple illustrative example of a collision accident in a single track railway shows that this approach is both easy to understand and adaptive to the situational change.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: 10

In complex systems, it is necessary to model a logical representation of the overall system interaction with respect to the individual subsystems. Operators are allowed to follow Emergency Operating Procedures, when a reactor is tripped because of accidents. But, it's very difficult to diagnose accidents and find out appropriate procedures to mitigate current accidents in a given short time. Even if they diagnose accidents, it also has possibility to misdiagnose. TMI accident is a good example of operators' errors. Methodology using Influence Diagrams has been developed and applied for representing the dependency behaviors and uncertain behaviors of complex systems. An example to diagnose the accidents such as SLOCA and SGTR with similar symptoms has been introduced. From the constructed model, operators could diagnose accidents at any states of accidents. This model can offer the information about accidents with given symptoms. This model might help operators to diagnose correctly and rapidly. It might be very useful to support operators to reduce human error. Also, from this study, it is applicable to diagnose other accidents with similar symptoms and to analyze causes of reactor trip.
Received from the Guest Editor on August 18, 2006
References: 07

The current preoccupation with risk and safety has created an industry which is principally concerned with anticipation and control of unintended undesirable events entailing loss to the society or the environment and harm to people. In the mean time, risk based approach to many aspects of engineering and public life have permeated the language and the regulatory landscape. The great civilizations of the East developed holistic world views and philosophies which extolled the virtues of maintaining a balance between the two polar opposing forces in life. Alas this visionary and empirical perspective has been overshadowed by unilateral concern and aversion to risk and adversity in modern times. This paper develops a systematic and unambiguous framework for the so called up-side and down-side risk and provides a practical illustrative case study for the new holism that it advocates. The case study is chosen from the rail industry where a complex decision based on the anticipated but generally unknown performance of a new technology has been facilitated through a scientific framework for bipolar assessment of up-side and down-side risks. This enabled the duty holders to arrive at a decision based on the balance of loss and gain rather than minimization of risk and adversity as advocated in legal frameworks today.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 25, 2006
References: 03

The flow accelerated corrosion (FAC) occurred on the shell side near the inlet nozzle of the feedwater heater is considered the major failure mechanism of the feedwater system in a nuclear power plant. Therefore, a semi-empirical formula proposed by Siemens/KWU is used in the present study to predict the extent of corrosion of the heater-wall caused by FAC. The formula is proved to be able to predict the amount of corrosion very accurately, and sensitivity analysis indicates that, aside from other factors, fluid velocity, steam quality and oxygen content have significant influences on the corrosion rate. A Monte Carlo method that considers randomness of several parameters is employed to simulate amounts of wall-corrosion of individual feedwater heaters and evaluate their relative risks. Under the assumption that risks for other components of the feedwater system are also known, probabilistic-risk-assessment (PRA) is applied to the entire feedwater system. Several importance measures including Fussell-Vesely (FV), risk achievement worth (RAW), and difference importance measure (DIM) are adopted for risk ranking of individual heaters and other components. It is found that although RAW is simpler to use but its result is not so distinctive among individual components as compared to the other two measures. Since the risk-significance of each component obtained or assumed evolves with time, a proper and economical inspection program that emphasizes certain components at certain times can therefore be made.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 25, 2006
References: 10

With the improvements inspired from past BWR operating experiences, several ABWR type of nuclear power plants are now operating or under construction in Japan and Taiwan. The process to develop PRA model for ABWR is similar with those of past BWRs. The key point is the PRA model should reflect the particular designs and operating procedures of ABWR. Initiating event analysis is the first work item of PRA model development. This paper describes the process and results of initiating event analysis for ABWR which is under construction in Taiwan. Numerous references were reviewed to ensure the completeness of analysis for the need of future risk-informed applications. During the analysis, most staffs of operating and technical analysis divisions were involved in the discussions to identify and group the initiating events. The opinions from the plant staffs are very helpful for the completeness of the analysis. More than 20 initiating events were identified which can be classified into four categories. Some initiating event frequencies are determined by solving system fault tree to reflect the system design and plant configuration. Each initiating events has its own event tree by considering the actual plant configuration, plant response and actions of operating crew after the occurrence of the initiating event. This number of initiating events is significant larger than a typical PRA model had since some events were separated for the need of risk-informed applications.
Received from the Guest Editor on August 9, 2006
References: 11

Remote IT-based support and operations of offshore oil and gas installations are increasing. The technology used to support operations is changing from proprietary closed process control systems to standardize IT systems, connected to internal networks and the Internet. In addition, a network of companies is increasingly performing operations and management. The standardized PCs using MS Windows have more vulnerability than the proprietary systems used earlier, and the increased connections and participants in the networks increase the vulnerability. This creates the need for improved information security. Our hypothesis is that an important contribution to improved information security and safety is an improved safety and security culture and improved information sharing during operations and incident handling. Such a safety and security culture should be explicitly directed towards actions that support learning. We have developed a method called CheckIT, consisting of a questionnaire and a process to improve information security and safety culture based on group discussions of key issues. Future work in this area includes refinement of the questionnaire, as well as the use of system simulation to develop a holistic perspective on the causes and outcomes of their security policies.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: 31

To ensure safe use and durability of high-rise buildings, their walls must be properly maintained. This paper describes a wall inspection system, which applies an unmanned gondola and non-destructive test (NDT) technology. This system is designed to facilitate the costly and timely maintenance task of the exterior wall of high-rise buildings, especially when the wall is decorated by mosaic tiles. The aim is to determine the bonding condition of these tiles on wall. The NDT applies the impact acoustics technique that hits the wall point by point with a number of steel balls. Any de-bond state will be extracted, and the corresponding degree of such de-bond condition can also be determined. This system has been applied to inspect the exterior walls of public housing-estate buildings. The experimental results confirming the validity of this proposed system are included in this paper.
Received from the Guest Editor on July 31, 2006
References: 13