High-Speed Railway Safety: Design, Development and Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

High-speed railway (HSR) has become one of the most important transportation mode for long-distance travel worldwide. The safe operation of HSR systems faces challenges, particularly in terms of real-time condition monitoring, dynamic maintenance, and safety-oriented redundant design of infrastructures and trains. In recent years, advanced methods of artificial intelligence, data-driven analysis, and machine learning have been studied for application to high-speed railway systems. These emerging methods provide new opportunities and insights to further enhance the safety performance of HSR systems under the complex and extreme environments in which they operate while simultaneously contributing to the reduction in operational and maintenance costs.

This Special Issue aims to collect original research articles, review papers, and practical application studies related to the safety, reliability, and resilience of HSR systems during design, construction, operation, and maintenance stages. Relevant HSR elements of study include, but are not limited to, bridges, tunnels, subgrades, tracks, stations, trains, and their integrated networked systems.

Corresponding potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Advanced monitoring methods: Dynamic condition monitoring of infrastructure elements (including bridges, tunnels, subgrades, tracks, stations, etc.) and trains using advanced sensing and monitoring technologies.
• Fault diagnosis and prognostics: Application of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data-driven approaches for fault detection, defect detection, diagnosis, and prediction of infrastructure and trains.
• Health management frameworks: Development of advanced health management frameworks for infrastructure systems, subsystems, and critical components.
• Reliability, availability, maintainability, safety, interoperability (RAMSI) assessment: Evaluation methods for the reliability, availability, maintainability, safety, and interoperability of high-speed railway infrastructures and trains based on multi-source data.
• Risk management and safety evaluation: Modeling of risk sources and risk evolution during the construction and operation of high-speed railways and quantitative assessment of safety levels.
• Operation and maintenance optimization: Optimization strategies for operation and maintenance considering the stochastic failure behavior of components or subsystems, aiming to reduce costs while ensuring safety.
• Emergency management and resilience enhancement: Optimization of emergency and resilience management strategies for natural hazards and other disruptive events to improve the response capability of high-speed railway systems.
• Case studies and real-world applications: Successful practical applications and engineering case studies related to high-speed railway safety.

Dr. Yucheng Hao
Dr. Ping Li
Dr. Ning Wang
Prof. Dr. Yanhui Wang
Prof. Dr. Enrico Zio
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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