The Cognitive Railway: Human Factors Engineering for a Safe, Automated Future

University of York, Monday 16 November

For more than a century, technologies such as interlocking, train detection, and train protection have progressively transferred sensing, communication, and control from people to machines. ETCS, traffic management, remote condition monitoring, and artificial intelligence have extended that trajectory further into cognitive work, reshaping the roles of signallers, drivers, controllers, maintainers, and engineers. A key human factors challenge in the age of automation is therefore how to manage the transition from mechanising individual tasks to designing effective relationships between people and increasingly capable machines.

​

Drawing on work grounded in cognitive systems engineering methods and the latest research into human-AI collaboration, this talk will consider the railway as a joint cognitive system in which safety and performance emerge from the interaction of people, processes and technology. It will confront the misconception that automation removes ‘human error’, showing instead how it redistributes cognitive work, creates new dependencies, and can leave people responsible for systems they no longer fully understand.

​

With examples from the design, delivery and assurance of driver advisory systems, level crossings, and ETCS projects, the talk will explain how automation affects vigilance, attention, expertise, judgement, and recovery from failure, and will leave attendees with practical ways to examine architectures, designs and safety arguments in order to understand whether automation will strengthen human capability and system resilience or gradually erode them.

Richard Bye, Network Rail – Bio

Richard is the Head of Ergonomics and Human Factors at Network Rail – the owner, operator and maintainer of Britain’s rail network. With more than twenty years of hands-on ergonomics and human factors experience, Richard has worked on initiatives as diverse as the assurance of safety-critical processes, the design of AI and computer vision systems, the introduction of smartphones and tablets for frontline track workers, the development of decision support tools for the railway’s internet of things, and the implementation of automation technology to increase system resilience.

The lecture will be foremost an inperson event with space for 40 attendees.

Refreshments from 17:00, lecture starts at 18:00

There will also be a vimeo link available to watch online.

Description supplied by the event organiser.