Practical visualisation and communications tools for changes to complex user roles in the operational railway

This poster will outline a process being used by the Human Factors team in the Signalling Programme in Denmark. Our challenge has been to communicate to a mixed team of infrastructure operations, production and maintenance... [ view full abstract ]

This poster will outline a process being used by the Human Factors team in the Signalling Programme in Denmark. Our challenge has been to communicate to a mixed team of infrastructure operations, production and maintenance managers what the "new world" will look like. Especially, what roles will be needed when the Traffic Management System (TMS) is implemented.

We demonstrate how we are applying novel tools and principles to define user roles and responsibilities within a new TMS and associated maintenance diagnostics and management tools. This includes working with colleagues to understand how signalling failures are managed when they impact the operational railway.

The poster will focus on 3 key messages:

1. Communication – we explain that understanding the communications of a role is as important as using their tasks to define a role, this is useful due to:

   • Visibility of the activities and additional involvement, which are otherwise hidden within ‘softer’ communications for railway operations.

   • Understanding the organisational context based on different scenarios.

   • Identification of the wider purpose by grouping their communications into safety, traffic, infrastructure and more.

   • Reviewing the communication flow between user roles to understand procedures, training needs and technologies used.

   • Assessing where there is opportunity for human error in communication which may lead to unsafe or disruptive situations.

2. Centralised – the principle that communications can be modelled around a ‘centralised’ user role, rather than a systems overview has provided benefits:

   • Reduces the complexity of the systems overview by ‘zooming’ in on the role and visualising their communications and grouping them for better understanding.

   • Allows for the comparison of roles side-by-side to show the differences in their responsibilities and communications.

   • Supports the representation of facilitating technology, communication direction and the operational rules and procedures.

   • Demonstrates that a ‘centralised’ role communicates with some specific user role multiple times but within different contexts.

3. Process flow – we use a repeatable ‘swim lane’ diagram to show how the roles interact to manage a signalling failure which impacts the traffic:

   • The understanding gained from the centralised approach can re-used for a specific scenario, using the swim lanes to visualise the complete organisation involved.

   • The swim lanes consist of communications between user roles and the logical sequence of failure correction activities, which helps to identify training needs in terms of equipment and procedures.

   • This is an evolution into the operational context allows the organisational management review job descriptions, hard and soft skills and practical issues like co-location.

The poster will show the application of the two key models used, with output for real users that will be part of the traffic management delivery and support team. The authors will be available to explain how the techniques were developed and the benefits and challenges realised. The wider scope of this HF lead approach was to positively influence the training material for railway operations.