The Requirement

The eastern section of the South Island Line (SIL (E)) is a critical infrastructure development in Hong Kong to relieve the traffic bottlenecks of the Aberdeen Tunnel and the Central Business District.

MTRCL, the rail developer, adopts a compulsory value assurance process, which depicts the required analyses and assurance tasks that must be conducted to achieve the reliability and safety objectives.

A comprehensive systems assurance process was implemented by BMT to evaluate the reliability, availability, maintainability and safety performance of the design.

This involves identification and quantification evaluation of the failure and maintenance data of the various sub-systems as well as potential hazards that may arise all the way from the design phase, construction phase, testing and commissioning phase, defects liability phase through operation and maintenance phases of the new rail project.

Our Approach

A Systems Assurance process is applied to assure systems engineering processes and products conform to systems requirements for reliability, availability, maintainability and operational safety (RAMS), standards, procedures and regulations.

SA activities, conducted throughout the project stage include:

• Systems Assurance Plan
• Hazard Analysis and Management
• RAM analysis, Functional Block Diagram
• Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis
• Reliability Block Diagram
• RAM Modeling, Allocations and Predictions
• Fault Tree Analysis
• Event Tree Analysis
• SIL Analysis
• Systems Compliance Audit
• RAM demonstration plan & reports
• Failure Reporting & Corrective Action System (FRACAS)

Outcome and Benefits

Systems assurance management enhances the contractor’s capability to control system design and classify related hazards before the design is finalised, thus saving unnecessary costs from modifying inappropriate design.

Throughout the SIL(E) project, BMT assisted in assuring that the processes and final products satisfy the stakeholder requirements.