Making effective use of task analysis to identify human factors issues in new rail technology

Task analysis is an important tool that enables designers to consider the human factors implications of a new technology. This paper details a task analysis for the task of driving long-haul freight trains in Australia and describes how this task analysis was used to evaluate a new in-cab information support technology. This paper then explores similarities and differences between this task analysis and one proposed by Roth and Multer (2009). It is argued that these two task analyses can form the basis for many future task analyses so that we can avoid ‘reinventing the wheel,’ allowing us to focus more on potential interesting differences between operations and geographical locations.

► We provide a detailed task analysis of long-haul train driving.
► We use task analysis to evaluate a new in-cab information support technology.
► We compare the Australian freight train driving task with US passenger train driving.