Mass Rapid Transit Systems (MRTS), also known as heavy rail, metro, subway, tube, U-Bahn, T-Bane, metropolitana or underground include modes of urban transport (both road and rail based) that carry large volume of passenger quickly.
The essential feature of MRTS is that many people are carried in the same vehicle (e.g. buses) or collection of attached cars (i.e. trains).
MRTS tend to be along well-defined corridors connecting suburbs to the city centres and in most case have reserved righ-of-way.
Most of the MRTS are fully automatic and only a few remains semi-automatic or manual. The objectives behind these automatons are to deliver an efficient, safe and reliable Metro Rail with better service punctuality thanks to the application of RAMS (Reliability, Affidability, Maintainability and Safety) standards since the early design stages. The RAMS in Railways are relatively new as compared to other industries such as nuclear, power, chemical, avionic etc.
The first RAMS standard on railways system was published by the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) in 1999 as EN 50126.
Italcertifer is involved in some of the major worldwide projects of Mass Transit Systems as Independent Safety Assessor (ISA), Independent Competent Person (ICP) and Independent Checking Engineer (ICE).