System Assurance for Automatic Fare Collection System in Bangkok's Airport Rail Link network

Requirements

The Suvarnabhumi Airport Rail Link (ARL) owned by the State Railway of Thailand is an express and commuter rail in Bangkok, Thailand. The ARL includes eight stations and connects the airport to the city's BTS skytrain, at Phayathai station.

The Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) system automates the ticket accounting and selling processes and provides detailed data on system usage. There are two types of tickets: single-trip tokens and pre-paid Smart Passes. The ticket vending machine accepts both coins and banknotes.

The AFC scope of works under System Assurance (SA) and Reliability, Availability, Maintenance and Safety (RAMS) was awarded to us by Thales Transport & Security (Hong Kong) Ltd.

Solutions

We conducted a series of system assurance activities to identify and analyse related hazards, suggest safeguards for mitigation and monitor the progress of the mitigation throughout the project lifecycle. Our analyses included:

• Subsystem Hazard Analysis
• Interface Hazard Analysis
• FMECA
• Safety Critical Items List
• Reliability and Maintainability
• Reliability Prediction and Apportionment
• Quantitative Maintainability
• Reliability Block Diagrams
• Reliability Demonstration
• Maintainability Demonstration
• Safety Demonstration

Benefits

Our experienced team provided the following deliverables to the customer:

• Potential hazards, operability and maintainability problems were identified and recorded;
• Development of a high quality operational hazard log detailing a clear rationale for actions and tracking methods;
• Development of reliability block diagrams to demonstrate system strengths and the weaknesses;
• Reliability, availability, and maintainability of the systems were studied, to ensure service performance targets can be met.