A Systems Approach to Predicting and Measuring Workload in Rail Traffic Management Systems

The introduction of systems such as Traffic Management (TM) will result in a number of changes in how the railway is managed for operations and maintenance staff such as, an increase in collaborative working styles and shared responsibilities. In order to react to these changing operational demands and user needs, TM workstation designs need to have greater flexibility and be configurable to support the information requirements for each specific role as well as support each role during different scenarios. Although this flexibility in system design has the potential to enhance performance, it increases the complexity of measuring operator workload. The In2Rail project explored these issues and this paper summarises the outputs; key future workload principles to consider, a proposed toolset to forecast workload and modifications to existing measurement techniques.