Assessing Railway Emergency Management Capability Enabled by Digital and Intelligent Technologies

Abstract Railways, as critical infrastructure, represent a key domain for digital and intelligent transformation. This transformation places new demands on railway emergency capability, including dynamic perception, intelligent decision-making, and coordinated response. However, traditional railway emergency capability evaluation systems have difficulty effectively quantifying these new requirements, resulting in certain limitations in adapting to the context of digital and intelligent empowerment. Based on existing railway emergency capability evaluation indicators, this study incorporates digital and intelligent factors to optimize the evaluation framework and develops a comprehensive analytical framework for railway emergency capability under digital and intelligent empowerment. A second-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model is introduced to construct and validate the hierarchical measurement structure of railway emergency capability and to identify the relative contributions of different capability dimensions to the overall construct. In addition, the evidential reasoning (ER) algorithm is employed to integrate evaluation information and achieve the quantitative evaluation of railway emergency capability. Finally, China Railway Nanchang Group Co., Ltd. is selected as a case study to empirically assess railway emergency capability under digitally intelligent enabling conditions. The results indicate that the overall emergency capability of the Nanchang Group remains at a moderate level. The belief degree associated with the “Medium” grade is the highest, at 49.85%, followed by the “Good” grade at 35.00%, suggesting a moderately above-average performance that is broadly consistent with current development conditions. By integrating a second-order CFA and ER, the proposed approach enables more objective weight determination and a more rational classification of capability levels, and may provide both theoretical support and a practical reference for the evaluation and improvement of railway emergency capability.