RELIABILITY CHARACTERISTICS OF RAILWAY COMMUNICATION SYSTEM SUBJECT TO SWITCH FAILURE

Abstract

In the present study, a railway communication system (RCS) reliability model is developed based on system failure. The proposed RCS has control centre and stations which are arranged in such a manner that failure of control centre or a single station stops the working of overall system i.e., all switches must be working for communication to be available. To improve the reliability of the proposed communication system, a ring architecture is employed. In this architecture one additional communication path is connected in parallel configuration. Provision of two path of communication ensures that failure of one path will not cause a communication failure and communication will be available through additional path. All failures of RCS are exponentially distributed. Mathematical modelling of the system is carried out using Markov process by which the differential equations are generated. These differential equations are further used to evaluate the reliability measures like availability, reliability, mean time to failure of the proposed RCS. Likewise, sensitivity analysis is done to determine the impact of failures on RCS’s performance measures. The proposed Markov process-based model gives the information about the failure and working of the multi- state railway communication system. Finally, numerical results are provided with graphs to demonstrates the usefulness of the findings.