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Title:

Designing Complex Subway Emergency Response Systems Using Desirable System States

Accession Number:

01122536

Record Type:

Component

Availability:

Transportation Research Board Business Office

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Abstract:

Transit emergencies have three attributes that create difficulties when designing response systems: geographical distribution, interactive complexity and uncertainty, and a variety of types of response system components. Engineers rely on physical representations, while operational managers rely on cognitive representations of systems, increasing the difficulty of cooperatively designing systems that can respond to a broad range of scenarios when events play out in unpredictable ways. The authors propose the use of Desirable Systems States as a construct that helps design teams overcome all of the above problems. Desirable System States are goals that can be evoked by physical processes or goal-driven operational decisions. The paper uses Desirable System States to model alternative views of a system designed to respond to an arson fire on a subway train. In the first representation, Desirable System States are temporally arranged to show how mitigation and response measures can be used to preserve and instigate Desirable System States. Both physical and cognitive representations of events are shown as they evolve during the scenario. An alternative model uses Desirable System States in a goal decomposition model that overcomes the shortcomings of the deterministic representation in the table. In the goal decomposition approach, abstract high level goals are decomposed to reveal the increasingly specific design features used to achieve the high level goals. The model enables the design team to explore the combinations of means by which they can successfully achieve high level design goals.

Monograph Accession #:

01120148

Report/Paper Numbers:

09-3054

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Authors:

Groner, Norman
Till, Robert

Pagination:

11p

Publication Date:

2009

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 88th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2009-1-11 to 2009-1-15
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

DVD

Features:

Figures (1) ; References; Tables (1)

Subject Areas:

Public Transportation; Security and Emergencies; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2009 Paper #09-3054

Files:

TRIS, TRB

Created Date:

Jan 30 2009 7:26PM