A New Model of Safety Management System for Railway Operation

Safety management systems (SMSs) were introduced to the rail industry as a proactive way to manage safety and prevent accidents. However, accidents still occur where the SMS has been implemented but ineffective. It is, therefore, of great importance to have a reality check of what the role and functions of an SMS are in order to understand why the SMS does not prevent organisational accidents and to identify the weakness of SMS as underlying causes in accidents.This paper is a summary of the report based on previous research (Pan, 2014). It presents a systemic review of SMS elements based on analysis of accident reports and proposes an innovative SMS model in order to discover potential improvements for SMS implementation. The review based on selected accident reports focused on analysing the individual SMS elements involved in the accidents and identified the most critical elements in accidents are safety-related information management, risk assessment and competence management. The main findings from the research lie in the failure patterns of SMS elements in accidents, organisational features of the rail accidents, inadequate standards for SMS design, and industrial emphasis in implementation. We gave our recommendations on SMS implementations based on this review. And future research can be processed in the areas of improvement of the SMS model, detailed analysis of SMS involvement in the accidents, and the actual value of the SMS.