Big Data Risk Analysis for Rail Safety?

Computer scientists believe that the enormous amounts of data in the internet will unchain a management revolution of uncanny proportions. Yet, to date, the potential benefit of this revolution is scantily investigated for safety and risk management. This paper gives a brief overview of a research programme that investigates how the new internet-driven data-revolution could benefit safety and risk management for railway safety in the UK. The paper gives a brief overview the current activities in this programme and infers whether big-data techniques provide a sensible addition to the safety and risk sciences. The overview shows that there is added value for introducing these techniques in the safety and risk domain but serious challenges need to be addressed.