Reliability allocation of railway system based on fault tree

Purpose This paper focuses on studying the reliability allocation for the railway system, aiming to improve the overall reliability of the railway system and ensure safety operation. Design/methodology/approach In view of the complex structure of the railway system, involving many subsystems, this paper analyzes the close dynamic coupling effect between railway subsystems. Based on this, taking the railway system failure as the top event, a fault tree is constructed in this paper. Then, a reliability allocation method based on the fault tree is employed to allocate the reliability index. Finally, a numerical experiment is implemented to show the performance of the reliability allocation method. Findings The results showed that each subsystem needs to improve its reliability to meet the specified railway system reliability requirements, and the traction power supply system is the most important subsystem, which is the most efficient in improving the reliability of the railway system. Originality/value For the first time, starting from a holistic perspective of the system, reliability allocation is carried out based on the importance of each railway subsystem.