Acmena’s user-centred and integrated approach helps to deliver effective human factors support for Brisbane’s $5.4b Cross River Rail project.

Announced in 2016, Cross River Rail (CRR) will deliver a new 10.2km line through Brisbane’s inner city. The $5.4b project will feature twin 5.9km tunnels running under the Brisbane River and CBD, in addition to four new underground stations and the upgrade of existing stations.

CRR has been divided in to three primary contract packages: Rail, Integration and Systems (RIS), delivered by the Unity Alliance; Tunnels, Stations and Development (TSD), delivered by PULSE and ETCS, which is being delivered by Hitachi. Acmena has been engaged by both contract consortia and is currently leading human factors (HF), systems engineering (SE), safety and RAM activities across the project.

Leveraging its experience in supporting complex rail infrastructure projects, Acmena’s HF team integrated its program into the top-down systems engineering approach as early as possible. This ensures that any HF issues can be addressed and integrated sooner in the design process, reducing the likelihood of revisions.

Acmena has integrated human factors across both the delivery and integration levels of RIS and TSD. An Early Human Factors Analysis (EHFA) was conducted, which allowed the Acmena team to identify key changes to end users, plan HF activities and identify issues.

A User-Centred Approach

At the TSD and RIS delivery levels, Acmena completed an HF checklist for each design pack. This checklist has identified the impact to end users, HF issues, and the HF activities required to support design. The team has also derived human factors requirements, which have been included in the design packs’ Risk Verification Traceability Matrix (RVTM) to ensure that the HF requirements are included in the design.

At the RIS integration level, the Acmena team has led a series of Day-in-the-life-of (DITLO) workshops. These workshops have involved key stakeholders, including end-user representatives and have covered a range of normal, degraded, and emergency scenarios that have enabled the RIS team to understand the operational and maintenance requirements.

They have also identified gaps in the concept of operations, helped develop the system architecture and identified further requirements and safety/HF activities. The DITLOs have been supported with a series of operational scenario workshops, task analyses and human error analyses.

Acmena’s focus on adopting a user-centred approach has provided more effective integration than traditional systems engineering definition processes, where disciplines are often siloed, which can limit their success.

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