Quantitative risk assessment for railway tunnels: An integrated method and tool to support the fulfillment of the most recent normative requirements

Due to the characteristics of the European territory, often railway connections must deal with crossing important mountain chains, and therefore leading to the construction of fundamental infrastructures as long tunnels. During the last years many long tunnels have been built (e.g. Eurotunnel and Loetschberg) or planned (e.g. Torino-Lyon and Brenner Base Tunnel) and, unfortunately, some severe accidents have been experienced (e.g. Eurotunnel and Monte Bianco). This forced governments and lawmakers to carefully deal with an effective normative framework based on a scientific approach to safety issues. Starting from the description of the European and Italian Normative framework, the paper will present step by step the methodology set up by the authors for performing a complete QRA (Quantitative Risk Assessment) of the railway tunnels in accordance with the most recent Italian legislation.