All railway networks across Europe work to capacity, have less track access time and room for error and an increasing risk to trackside staff who have less access time to maintain the infrastructure. Also with a drive for adoption of BIM (building information modelling) for infrastructure, our developments would enable re-use of this engineering data to provide non-technical safety visualisations, spreading the benefit of the BIM investment away from just facility owners and design teams.
Stakeholders
Consultation ranged from the Health and Safety Executive, to London Underground, Network Rail, Consulting Engineers (Arup, Tata, URS) and current PTS (Personal Track Safety) training providers. Discussions highlighted the need to engage the trainees, move away from recalling information just long enough to pass a test and towards embedding an understanding of consequences and the subtler points of behavioural safety that are usually only learnt by experience on site.
Work performed
From Phase 1 work, a range training aids, visualisations and interactive virtual reality behavioural safety training environment have been created and demonstrated to the above stakeholders. The first concept product involved augmenting 2D engineering drawings and topographical surveys with safety critical knowledge to enable situational awareness. This progressed to re-using 3D engineering data to create VR environments of existing sites aiming at a safety visualisation for briefing and collaborating on large construction projects. Lastly, creating fully immersive behavioural training environments with hazard location, geo-referencing of risk, incident reconstruction and trainer analysis of trainee actions.
