Shared Situation Awareness as a Contributor to High Reliability Performance in Railroad Operations

Abstract

Cooperative strategies of individuals within a distributed organization can contribute to increased efficiency of operations and safety. We examine these processes in the context of a particular work domain: railroad operations. Analyses revealed a variety of informal cooperative strategies that railroad workers have developed that span across multiple railroad crafts including roadway workers, train crews, and railroad dispatchers. These informal, proactive communications foster shared situation awareness across the distributed organization, facilitate work, and contribute to the overall efficiency, safety, and resilience to error of railroad operations. We discuss design implications for leveraging new digital technologies and location-finding systems to more effectively support these informal strategies, enhance shared situation awareness, and promote high reliability performance.Complex socio-technical systems depend on the work of multiple individuals distributed in time and space. Examples include military command and control, space shuttle operations, air traffic control, and railroad operations. Performance depends on coordinated work among individuals that may not be collocated, have responsibility for different subsets of goals, different access to data, and different situation perspectives. There has been growing interest in understanding the cognitive and collaborative factors that enable such teams to work effectively Smith et al. 2000;Salas and Fiore 2004). In this paper we examine distributed team processes in the context of railroad operations. We focus particularly on the role of informal strategies for maintaining shared situation awareness among roadway workers, train crews, and railroad dispatchers and enhancing overall efficiency and safety of operations.Organization Studies 27(7): 967-987

Technology Implications of a Cognitive Task Analysis for Locomotive Engineers

“…The active work that locomotive engineers engage in to build and update a mental model of the location and activities of others in the vicinity is consistent with the behavior we have observed of individuals from other railroad crafts including dispatchers and roadway workers (Roth, Multer, and Raslear, 2006). Also consistent with observations in other railroad crafts, including dispatchers and roadway workers, is the emergence of cooperative communication practices that go beyond the requirements of formal operating rules.…”

“…McLeod, Walker, and Moray (2005) have argued that this level of analysis is necessary to understand the critical factors that influence actual performance in a realworld, real-time, environment. This includes factors that contribute to error as well as factors that contribute high reliability performance and resilience in the face of unanticipated conditions (Hollnagel, Woods, and Leveson, 2006;Roth, Multer, and Raslear, 2006).…”

“…We found that dispatchers, train crews, and roadway workers routinely engage in informal communication for the sole purpose of enhancing each other's situation awareness. They routinely call these communications courtesies, but they clearly play an important role in enhancing overall safety and resilience of the railroad system (Roth, Multer, and Raslear, 2006).…”

A situation awareness analysis scheme to identify deficiencies of complex man-machine interactions

“…Consequently, the term 'situation awareness' is widely used in commercial and military aviation (Endsley, 1993(Endsley, , 1999Wickens, 2002), air traffic control (Mogford, 1997;Niessen and Eyferth, 2001), process control (Kaber and Endsley, 1998;Patrick et al, 2006) and traffic operations (Roth et al, 2006;Wiersma, 2010). In the fields of aviation, air traffic control and process control, various theories of SA have been developed.…”

“…Cognitive task analysis (CTA) have been proposed as a means to determine SA requirements for a wide range of SA dependent task domains, for example aviation (Endsley, 1993), aviation maintenance teams (Endsley and Robertson, 2000) and traffic operations (Roth et al, 2006). The CTA is used to define 'perfect SA' (Endsley, 1993), seeking to determine a total set of information that operators ideally like to know to meet their goals (Endsley, 2012).…”