By Lilia Guan

 

The agreement was part of the RTA’s ongoing commitment to improve incident responses, consistent with the Moroney Report on the F3 traffic incident in April 2010.

 

Working closely with the 24-hour Transport Management Centre (TMC) in Sydney, NICTA will help manage the workloads of TMC operators during peak time demands, such as; a traffic accident occurs; special events demand road closures; and re-routing of traffic.

 

The IT research centre will apply technology which monitors the ‘cognitive load’ on individual operators in these situations, identifies incident-induced peaks in real time and manages them appropriately, Dr Fang Chen, project leader at NICTA said.

 

She said the work efficiency and wellbeing of the operators can be improved by better understanding their cognitive load profiles when managing incidents and preventing the onset of excessive workload.
 
“The system we are developing will be able to easily determine the workload that is being placed on the workers in the traffic management centre,” she said.

 

“As a result, it will be possible to prevent excessive workloads, which will result in the staff being more efficient.”

 

Dr Fang said the technology also enabled “improvement of the traffic management operations” through task assignment to operators, designing new

computerised systems and streamlining the incident management systems.

 

“NICTA will provide the research expertise, technology and background intellectual property for measuring the cognitive load of traffic operators automatically,” she said.

 

“RTA will provide the domain knowledge, expertise in traffic incident management systems, and environment to implement and test the new techniques that will be developed as part of the project.”