Safety Critical Software in Rail (SCSR) Training

About the Course

The Safety Critical Software in Rail certification course is a blended training programme providing software developers, engineers, testers, managers and others involved in safety-related projects with a detailed understanding of the fundamentals of safety critical software development and testing. This course is supported by a competency-based structure.

The opening module provides background to software lifecycle, the standards and their application in the railway drawing upon best practice. The next modules introduce a number of incidents where software failures resulted in incidents. The succeeding modules go into depth regarding the content, aims and requirements for developing software for the railway in accordance with EN50128 for all SIL levels.

The course content is mapped to:

• Industry standard competencies, skills and evidence requirements relevant to rail safety work
• Industry regulations
• National and international standards

Information is interspersed with practical exercises. There is a short multiple-choice examination at the end to assess the identified learning outcomes.

Who Should Attend

Any member of staff – decision makers, project managers, line managers, engineers, designers and others – who want to know what is safety critical software in rail and are involved with changes to the railway need an understanding of the latest best practice. The course provides a structured and robust approach to developing and testing complex railway projects safely that is aligned with the LATEST CENELEC standard EN50128:2011 and EN50657:2xx for rolling stock.

Key Learning Objectives

• Demonstrate a sound understanding of the principles and language of safety critical software
• Appreciate software risk in the context of railway design and safety management
• Describe how software design and the software safety lifecycle interact and influence each other
• Appreciate how current best practice in software safety standards and in particular latest EN50128 and EN50657
• Understand the need for a risk-based system engineering lifecycle approach to enable built-in safety, value and performance
• Understand how to review case studies to understand the potential for things to go wrong on the railway
• Understand the complexity of railway accidents involving software failures
• The demonstration of SFAIRP and compliance in regard to software
• Identify and mitigate Security issues from cyberthreats

Course Prerequisite

Participants should have a general understanding of engineering and project management principles and practices.

Course Information

Instructional Delivery Method: Schedule Digital
Prerequisite & Advanced Preparation: Reading material will be sent prior to the course 

Delivered by Dr Howard Parkinson

Howard is a chartered engineer with over 20 years of experience in the international railway industry, more recently as an independent consultant, researcher and trainer. He has experience in signaling, rolling stock, infrastructure and railway systems projects at a senior level and has just finished an assignment in Australia working on systems integration for automatic train protection.

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