This has led to frequent changes and updates in technical equipment as well as increased levels of automation. Due to the ever-increasing traffic demands, the transportation domain in large is pressured to increase the capacity and handle a greater number of transportations while maintaining high levels of safety and efficiency. It is, however, a highly dynamic domain with a plenitude of research challenges yet to be investigated. Research relating to aspects of human factors in the railway domain is a relatively understudied area of inquiry, especially if compared to aviation and road traffic. The implications for future railway research are briefly discussed. The analysis reveals a pattern of collaboration and coordination of actions among the workers and we introduce the concept of enacted actionable practices as a key concern for understanding how a successfully executed railway traffic emerges as a property of the socio-technical system. The theoretical framework of distributed cognition (DCog) is used as a conceptual and analytical tool to make sense of the complex railway domain and the best practices as they are developed and performed “in the wild”.
Train traffic control online game drivers#
This paper presents a study inspired by cognitive ethnography with the aim to characterise the coordinating activities that are conducted by train traffic controllers and train drivers in the work practices of the socio-technical system of Swedish railway. In operational railway traffic, the successful planning and execution of the traffic are the product of the socio-technical system comprised by both train drivers and traffic controllers. Although there has long been a call for a holistic systems perspective to better understand real work in the complex domain of railway traffic, prior research has not strongly emphasised the socio-technical perspective.