Common Cause Failures (CCFs) have the potential to make safety-related systems fail. Hence, the safety-critical industries identify and quantify the probability of CCFs. However, most industries rely on the models which depend on the engineering judgment for their CCF evaluations. These are likely to produce conservative results. Therefore, industries need to emphasize their CCF estimations.

This research focuses on analyzing the CCFs of High-integrity Electro-dynamic braking of railway propulsion systems to re-evaluate the assumptions made in the industry. The aim is to study the CCF methodology adopted in the industry and investigate ways to reduce the probability of CCFs by examining the software/hardware dependency factors of control systems, which consecutively benefit the industry by reducing the safety requirements and associated costs.