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RAMS

In today’s society, which seeks to have total control over events, the safety of people and infrastructure has become a primary concern. It is an objective in itself, and a highly sensitive issue in our time. As a result, risk is increasingly considered unacceptable, both for individuals and groups of people. Additionally, human beings have become more and more dependent on machines of increasing technical complexity, interfaces are proliferating and operational conditions are becoming more stringent. Requirements for operational safety, as well as reliability and availability, have become highly exacting.

Against this backdrop, a multitude of national and international standards, directives and regulations have been applied in order to guarantee the safety of human beings and the reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS) of infrastructure and equipment. It has therefore become essential for safety engineers to possess experience, detailed knowledge of these standards and of the most useful RAMS methods of analysis and thorough technical expertise in these systems.

Our specialists, with their extensive experience acquired on the international level, possess these qualities. They carry out hazard and risk analyses, and prepare RAMS studies and safety concepts and files for complex systems involving human beings, infrastructure and equipment. By applying a global, systemic and transdisciplinary approach, and taking into consideration the requirements and constraints of the immediate surroundings, they provide effective risk management, whilst incorporating suitable preventive measures. They carry out services throughout the life cycle and at all stages of the risk management process, from defining the context to providing demonstrations for RAMS, applying the most appropriate method for each problem (PHA, FTA, ETA, FMECA, HAZOP, ...). For railway applications, they use the CENELEC EN 50126, 50128 and 50129 standards. .

 

Domains of activities

  • Complex systems
  • Infrastructures
  • Buildings
  • Equipment
  • Persons
  • Processes

 

Core competencies

  • Hazard and risk analyses, RAMS studies
  • Safety cases and demonstrations
  • Type-approval of installations
  • Second opinions, expert advices and audits
  • Safety and evacuation concepts, contingency plan
  • Distribution of compartments and escape routes, fire resistance of materials

 

References

GESTE Engineering sécurité personne

Safety of infrastructures

Sustainable design of transport infrastructures (railway stations, metro stations, airports), shops centers, as well as of any building meant to receive public, involves a thorough thinking towards their safeness and their longevity. This includes elements such as the fire resistance of construction materials, the planning of emergency escape routes, smoke extraction systems, emergency equipment, etc.

This thinking is reined in by a regulatory framework elaborated through norms and standards. Both clients and providers must have the safeness of their installations being certified, and therefore must launch assessments, expertise and second glances to have the technical safeness of their installations being checked.

GESTE Engineering is entitled with various references of that kind, having applied this approach and presented its results to the relevant approval authorities on many occasions, for transport infrastructures, but also for infrastructures of commercial or administrative nature. The legal framework in Switzerland is given by the VKF (the Association of Cantonal Fire Insurances).

 

Our related core competencies

 

Our references

GESTE Engineering sécurité infrastructure

Safety of railway applications

Safety matters regarding the railway operation are based on a RAMS approach, consisting in two key documents: the safety case (European standard EN 50129) and the RAM demonstration (European standard EN 50126). These files are appropriate to railway applications: signaling, rolling stock and energy.

The safeness of systems and subsystems and of their integration is an ever-more sensitive issue, so that the RAM analysis of these requires an ever-more level of expertise.

GESTE Engineering can pretend to this level of expertise, as it covers both fields of RAMS and railway technic. As a matter of fact, the company is accredited by the French government (as an “OQA”, standing for “Organisme Qualifié Agréé”) to perform safety assessment of urban guided transport systems for the “control-command and signaling” subsystem.

 

Our related core competencies

 

Our references