Real-time management of transportation systems - The role of reliability professionals in dealing with drift.

Transportation system operations are constantly subject to changes that generate contradictory pressures with consequences for day to day operations, which are often difficult to predict. Each change may be rational by design; however, at the level of sys tem operations these changes can lead to a high level of input variance that needs to be dealt with. These disparities frequently require significant corporate investment in dealing with the outcomes of process variation. An existing evidence base points towards process-specific variation as the cause behind systemic drift. This capacity for transportation systems to drift is not sufficiently accounted for in transportation safety research, particularly from the perspective of how drift effects the real- time management of transport operations. This project aims to address this specific gap by researching the role of reliability professionals in dealing with system drift.

The notion of individuals, organisations and socio-technical systems drifting towa rds a state of increased risk is central in many conceptualisations of safety and the handling of conflicting objectives. However, we will argue that drift warrants further research, in that the role of reliability professionals in maintaining safe transp ortation systems is ill understood and not sufficiently appreciated in transportation designs and regulatory development. With reliability professionals we mean highly trained, experienced and highly dedicated personnel that have a leadership responsibili ty in management of transportation systems, such as airline station managers, maintenance team leaders, rail traffic controllers and chief pilots.The kinds of implementation challenges that these stakeholders have to negotiate include the balancing of pla nning and design with trial and error learning - and the improvisation that this process often demands.