Performance shaping factors affecting driver safety-related behaviour in urban rail systems : Tyne & Wear Metro case

PhD ThesisIt is accepted that train drivers’ safety performance is affected by numerous performance shaping factors (PSF). Design of the physical environment is among these factors. Even though the body of knowledge in rail human factors is increasing, it is limited as it is often i) reactive, ii) focusing mainly on single type incidents, iii) prioritising high profile accidents, iv) not always fully addressing existing risk profiles. Railway systems with different design features are usually grouped together for research purposes thus disregarding the fact that system design can alter effects of the PSFs. This is especially true for urban rail systems. A combination of concurrent and sequential research in this mixed methods thesis has investigated PSFs associated with metro systems design, using the Tyne & Wear Metro system as its application case. The PSFs embedded in everyday operations have been studied on different system levels through historic incident analysis, drivers’ surveys, semi-structured interviews, eye-tracking and simulation experiments. Some of the established methodologies have been adapted in order to address the research objectives set. Novel approaches have been developed for the deployment of in-service eye-tracking using dynamic areas of interest and the development of a low-cost high fidelity simulator using gaming software and hardware. Selected station layouts have been assessed through measures of workload, stress and signal checking behaviour thus supporting PSF inter-dependence. The results suggest the influence on the performance of arrival and departure procedures of the angle between a signal, a driver and a mirror. Among the latent conditions potentially inducing incident propagation are passenger levels, the platform side, informativeness of design elements, openness and lighting conditions of a station, and distances from a stopping position to other elements of the station design.Institute for Sustainability at Newcastle University, through the Sir James Knott and Ridley PhD Scholarshi

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Business optimization through automated signaling design

M.Ing. (Engineering Management)Abstract: Railway signaling has become pivotal in the development of railway systems over the years. There is a global demand for upgrading signaling systems for improved efficiency. Upgrading signaling systems requires new signaling designs and modifications to adjacent signaling systems. The purpose of this research is to compare manually produced designs with design automation by covering the framework of multiple aspects of railway signaling designs in view of business optimization using computer drawings, programming software language and management of signaling designs. The research focuses on design automation from the preliminary design stage to the detailed design stage with the intention of investigating and resolving a common project challenge of time management. Various autonomous methods are used to seek improvement on the detailed design phase of re-signaling projects. An analysis on the project’s duration, resources and review cycles is conducted to demonstrate the challenges that are faced during the design of a project. Signaling designs are sophisticated and crucial in an ever-changing railway environment. As a result, there is a demand for efficiency and knowledge within railway signaling to achieve successful completion project target dates. A quantitative approach is used to identify the gaps leading to delays and best practices are applied using a comparative analysis to remediate on any snags that may potentially extend the project duration. The results illustrate that the resources required when automating detailed designs are reduced by two thirds for cable plans and book of circuits and reduced by one third for source documents. Successively, the projects benefit with reduced organizational resources, reduced design durations and reduced design review cycles. This research concludes that software integration of the signaling designs due to the efficiency and innovation of the selected computer drawing software and programming software language such as AutoCAD required less resources for computer drawings that are generated using automation tools compared to computer drawings that are generated manually. The resources required when automating the generation of signaling detailed designs are reduced for cable plans, book of circuits and source documents. This means that the business is optimized by utilizing less resources and subsequently delays are reduced during the design stage