UK Chapter

At 2245 on Saturday 5th December 2015, the primary substation in Lancaster was inundated with flood water from the River Lune following heavy rain as part of Storm Desmond, cutting power supplies to 61,000 properties. Managing the effect of the extreme weather was an operational challenge for Electricity North West, but what was more notable was severe the impact the loss of supplies had on other services across the the city, highlighting the reliance of modern society on a reliable electricity supply.

Since a series of recent floods, resilience has become a hot topic within the utilities sector, and in 2014 BSI published BS 65000 on Organisation Resilience. The Rockefellar Institute have also developed the 100 Resilient Cities programme (of which Bristol and Glasgow are a part) to look at how a city become resilient to a range of challenges.

Do system engineers have a role to play in developing civic resilience, and how could systems engineering techniques be used to enable communities, towns and cities to respond to major shock, natural or otherwise?

This session will start with a some scene-setting, but then open up into an extended discussion-come-workshop to share ideas on what resilience means from a systems perspective, and how this can be applied to a community, town or city.

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There is currently a whirlwind of excitement and anticipation around innovation related to intelligent infrastructure, internet of things and smart cities. Much of this is technology-led and predicated on ‘more data equals more benefit’.

Whilst an element of this future is reliant on more open and shared data, other fundamental keys to unlock benefits quickly reside in vision, outcomes and business models. 

In this presentation, Rakesh Gaur of Transport for London explores how the skills to resolving these parameters are positively aligned to those who can apply a whole systems engineering approach; focusing on key requirements, understanding trade-offs, managing risk and knowing how to deal with the unintended. 

He will describe how the Transport for London approach blends both challenge and vision-led innovation and explores the potential consequences when a systems approach is not followed.

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Presenter: Niki Jobson

Presentation title: Systems Thinking and Systems Engineering - Same but Different?

Presentation  synopsis: The presentation will explore the role of systems thinking (ST) in developing a shared understanding of a complex, dynamic, multi-stakeholder problem space and characterising the nature of the challenges in order to provide a firm foundation for solution development.  It will seek to tease out the similarities and differences of applying ST during problem understanding and system engineering, and will provide a high level overview of underpinning ST concepts, laws, methods and tools and an emerging competency framework.  

Effectively engaging operations personnel in the very earliest stage of railway projects is essential if we are to avoid extensive rework or having to live with operational workarounds for sub-optimal decisions at the beginning.

Michael Coultharde-Steer, Lead Operational Development Manager at LU, will describe how and where significant benefits accrue from involving Operational input in the context of major upgrade programmes and how User Requirements Specifications are derived by a small team that includes operational end-user representatives and LU’s system engineers.

For further details pleasee see attached flyer.

The presentation is being arranged by the South East Branch of the Institution of Railway Operators (IRO) in collaboration with the INCOSE UK Railway Interest Group.

There is no charge for attendance and the event is open to those who are not INCOSE or IRO members but places must be booked in advance.

BOOKING FOR THIS EVENT IS VIA THE IRO.

Please book by emailing se.comms@railwayoperators.co.uk. To ask any other questions, please contact the RIG Chair, Bruce Elliott at bruce.elliott@altran.com or on +44 (0)7970 694043.

The need for the MOD to set out the future strategic context was articulated in the 1998 Strategic Defence Review. To meet that requirement, the Strategic Trends Programme was started in 2001 and the first edition of Global Strategic Trends (GST) was published in 2003. Subsequently, GST, along with the Future Operating Environment have been key elements of the MOD’s contribution to both the National Security Strategy and the Strategic Defence and Security Review – and we expect them to play similar roles in the future. 

GST is the first step in a series of MOD long-term planning activities. By providing a global context, further work will then be able to examine its implications and develop policy and capability options to meet the resulting challenges. While GST is produced principally for MOD it has utility for others involved in long-term planning. The program has benefited from considerable engagement with those outside MOD – from academia, business and government both domestically and internationally. In so doing, we have deliberately attempted to avoid a single, subjective perspective.

The presentation will discuss the starting point for the next version of GST and the way trends are being identified. It will discuss some of the analysing techniques used and the process upon which the next version of GST is being produced.

Paul Norman

Paul currently works for the Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre as the Technology lead for the strategic trends program. He received aMaster of Physics degree from the University of Manchester in 2000. After graduating he worked in the finance industry where he was promoted to the head of the offer and completions department within Alliance and Leicester. In 2003 Paul decided to change career and began working for the Defence Ordnance Safety Group where he worked as a numerical modeller and explosive effects scientist. In 2009 Paul studied for a Masters Degree in Explosive Ordnance Engineering at the Defence Academy. After graduation Paul decided to stay at the Defence Academy where he now works within the Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre.

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The application of requirements management to civil engineering-led, rail related, multi-disciplinary design and build projects has had varied success in recent years.  Key UK Rail clients have their own requirements management processes and the challenge for designers has been to find the right processes to facilitate demonstrating compliance of design, for more than 10 different disciplines, with swift approvals, fixed construction deadlines and without introducing significant addition cost.

In this presentation, Anne Bearne of Arup shares her experiences in delivering requirements management which meets the needs of client, and project managers and which design teams can efficiently embed within their design processes and outputs. This entails a tailoring of requirements management processes to respond to the way in which railway projects, and in particular largely civils based railway projects, are delivered.  

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Workshop to develop framework that covers/relates major aspects: lifecycle, process, artefacts, stakeholders, lines of development etc.

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The railway system is continually developing and changing. In long-established infrastructure systems, like the railway system of Great Britain, development is often complex. Innovation in these systems is both important and difficult to understand; it comes in many forms and through many different routes. This presentation is on research into how mature infrastructure systems develop and change; using social science theories on socio-technical systems the case of Great Britain’s railway system is examined. Privatisation of this system, initiated outside the railway system, has led to a series of different organisational arrangements directing system operation and development over a relatively short period. Examining these developments using socio-technical systems theories highlights ways in which innovation can be, deliberately and unintentionally, shaped and it shows connections between the social and the technical forces in play. Reflecting on privatisation and its aftermath can provide lessons for directing future development in the railway system. Improved understanding of processes around system development can be valuable to both practitioners and policymakers concerned with generating, or responding to, innovation.

Dr Kat Lovell is a Research Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex. Having trained in Engineering, Kat began her work on railways as part of a project on railway systems within the Rail Research UK consortium. This work inspired her PhD in Innovation Studies at Imperial College Business School researching the case of privatisation of Great Britain’s railway network. Kat’s research at SPRU is part of two interdisciplinary and interuniversity projects on UK infrastructure: International Centre for Infrastructure Futures (ICIF) where Kat’s work looks at business models for infrastructure development and ITRC-MISTRAL (Multi-scale Infrastructure Systems Analytics) researching infrastructure governance and development at different scales. Kat’s research focuses on infrastructure systems and how they change and for the future she is working with SPRU colleagues to develop ideas around inclusive infrastructure.

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