The aim of the £100,000 award-winning research project was to develop an automated system for monitoring the location of road vehicles.
An Irish research project which blended computer science and psychology has won a British award for the quality of the work's ergonomics.
Ergonomics is not just about comfortable keyboards and monitors that point in the correct direction, explained Mr Jerry Harpur of the Department of Computer Science at NUI Maynooth. It is broad enough to include more subtle aspects, including human/ computer interaction.
The key idea behind ergonomics is "you shouldn't design a product until you fully understand the task for which it is intended", Mr Harpur said.
The applied ergonomics award was given jointly by the Ergonomics Society, an international society of practitioners which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary, and Applied Ergonomics, an international journal from scientific publisher, Elsevier. The award is only given every three years or so, hence it is an award for research that was completed two years ago.
The aim of the £100,000 research project was to develop an automated system for monitoring the location of road vehicles. The commercial partner and co-funder was Dublin Bus and the academic researchers were computer scientists at Maynooth and the Department of Psychology at Trinity College, headed by Dr Ray Fuller.
Dublin Bus had developed a bus monitoring system in the 1980s but wanted an updated version, Mr Harpur said. "Our role was to try and develop a prototype system which would provide them with a way to assess a complete system."
The joining of computer science and psychology came about because of the complex working relationships which existed within the transport company. "Dublin Bus is a very highly stratified organisation," Mr Harpur said and new technology was often viewed as the "thin edge of redundancy" by many workers.
The research team couldn't align itself with any one group within the organisation, so it adopted a problem-solving analysis approach known as "soft systems methodology". "It is a way to understand problems within an organisation from a political perspective," Mr Harpur said.
The method was particularly appropriate because it analysed the tasks performed by human operators, not just the computational requirement to solve a computer problem. The researchers developed a prototype called the automated vehicle monitoring and control system, which is used by control inspector staff. A simple screen format provides information about all buses working any given route, from terminus to terminus in both directions. Stops along the route are marked and buses are shown as small squares identified by code number.
A colour code is used to show the progress of each bus. The square is red if the bus is running ahead of schedule, green if it is on time, or blue if it is running behind schedule.
Where to position a bus along the route is an automatic process handled by the computer. Each bus automatically signals the base station every 45 seconds via radio signal, giving its distance from the terminus. The system interprets the distance information and whether the bus is ahead or behind its schedule.
The prototype was tested on a single route for two months, Mr Harpur said. It was found to improve bus-control efficiency by between 20 and 50 per cent depending on the aspect of the job under study. "The controllers felt more in control," he said.
As Dublin Bus and CIE are still undergoing reorganisation, no decision has yet been taken on developing the prototype into a fullscale working system.