Fundamental understanding and future guidance for handheld computers in the rail industry

Advances in mobile computing technology and software applications have led to an expansion in potential uses for handheld computers for various tasks. One strong application area is in maintenance and inspection. Network Rail has been progressively developing and applying handheld computers to field-based maintenance and inspection operations, with the aims of improving work productivity and quality, and personal and system safety. However, it is clear that these aims so far have been achieved with varying degrees of success. Handheld computer devices have the potential to enhance the procedure of performing the tasks in many different ways. However, the current handheld computers introduced to maintenance and inspection tasks in Network Rail have principally been designed as data entry tools and in most cases the primary objective is to reduce the amount of paper work and the associated costs and errors. This highlights the need for fundamental research into the ways in which handheld computer technologies should be specified, designed and implemented for effective use in a complex distributed environment such as the rail industry. The main purpose of this research was to study the applications of handheld computers in the rail industry and to generate a set of design principles for development of future systems within Network Rail. The findings of this research have contributed to the identification of human factors principles that need to be considered for design and implementation of successful handheld computer applications. A framework was also developed to summarise and organise information and functional requirements of maintenance workers. Investigating maintenance workers’ requirements through interviews and observations emphasised the importance of rail specific spatial information and the benefits of providing this knowledge to maintenance workers through a mobile computing device which is portable and easy to use. However, displaying rail specific spatial information on the small screen of a handheld computer introduces various HCI issues and challenges. These were addressed in part through a programme of experiments, and therefore the final section of this research focused on examining fundamental aspects of presenting rail specific spatial information on handheld computer screens. The main findings from different stages of this research have been collated into a set of recommendations for design and development of usable and useful applications for handheld computer devices in the rail industry

Adaptive access control in coordination-based mobile agent systems

Abstract. The increased pervasiveness of mobile devices like cell phones, PDAs, and laptops draws attention to the need for coordination among these networked devices. The very nature of the environment requires devices to interact opportunistically when resources are available. Such interactions occur unpredictably as device users have no advance knowledge of others they will encounter. The openness of these environments also requires users to protect themselves and their data from unwanted interactions while maintaining desired, yet unscripted, coordination. As the ubiquity of communicating mobile devices increases, the number of applications supported by the network grows drastically and managing access control is crucial to such systems. Application agents must directly manipulate and examine access policies because these networks are often decoupled from a fixed infrastructure, rendering reliance on centralized servers for authentication and access policies impractical. In this paper, we explore context-aware access control policies tailored to the needs of agent coordination in open environments that exhibit mobility. We propose and evaluate novel constructs to support such policies, especially in the presence of large numbers of highly dynamic application agents.