Classification of safety barriers to improve safety and interoperability

Railway safety depends on the high-quality design of safety barriers and maintaining them during operation. In recent decades, many safety experts, such as Hollnagel and Reason, have reviewed and developed different methodologies for barrier management based on specific barrier taxonomies used by railways. Operational experience about barriers did not need to be shared, as every railway organisation both owned, and managed, their safety barriers in their own way.

But this model is no longer sustainable. With the ingress of technological solutions, in particular digital twins and the internet of things (IoT), the monitoring of barriers is becoming commonplace and modern railway undertakings, infrastructure managers and their subsidiaries depend on data sharing both internally and externally. Therefore, when it comes to interoperability for digital safety systems, it is imperative that consistent information formats are developed.