At the invitation of RZD, the third meeting of the Human Factors working group chaired by Yury Mironov, was held in Moscow.
After welcoming the participants, the chairman of the group Yury Mironov reminded them of the basic principles and expected goals of the group. The first working steps implemented by the group is the training of railway staff and passengers in order to establish common principles on these topics. The work is based on the collection of existing recommendations in each company and good practices in the various rail companies. The analysis of all material received will result in “the unified Internal Rules on Actions of security services and railway staff in emergency situation and instructions for passengers”.
The security platform chairman, Tadeusz Kaczmarek, from PKP PLK, underlined the importance of human factors which is a key element in improving the competitiveness of the rail companies and encouraged the group to develop recommendations to prepare and train staff on security issues.
Ho Kwon Cho, Asian region representative in the security steering committee, suggested creating a security expertise network in the Asian region and to organize in 2011 a joint security seminar promoted by Asian and Middle-East Assemblies focusing on various issues of human factors.
At the request of the Bulgarian delegation, Yury Mironov explained the responses given by the security service after the Nevsky Express tragedy in November 2009. Darmen Esenbaebv from Kazakhstan railways then shared his experience and described the protection measures implemented in Kazakhstan. Finally, Marie-Hélène Bonneau from UIC presented the PROTECTRAIL project (European research project in the framework of the FP7) which will start in early April. She raised the point that new technologies generate human factor problems yet to be solved and a good balance needs to be found.
Following these very constructive exchanges, RZD organized a technical visit to the JSC “RZD” Operation management centre.
Given the prominence of this topic, the work of the human factors group will be given an important mention on the agenda of the next UIC world security congress to be held in Istanbul from 21-23 April 2010.
All documents are available in the dedicated security workspace of the UIC extranet system at https://www.uic-online.com/
