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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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 INCOSE EMEA Workshop 2017 is the event for Systems Engineers from the EMEA region to contribute to the state of the art in Systems Engineering. Unlike the International Symposium and the national conferences, there are no paper, panel or tutorial presentations. Instead, attendees spend three days working alongside fellow Systems Engineers who are there to make a difference. Systems Engineers at all levels and from all backgrounds are encouraged to engage in working sessions, and to contribute their knowledge and experience to take the discipline forward.

The objective of this workshop is to meet with experts from different domains of Systems Engineering and different countries from around the world. During the workshop, you will have the opportunity to exchange your ideas and experience to move forward on the selected Systems Engineering topics.

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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To follow

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In the presentation “Eating the Elephant: ETCS Requirements for GB railway”, John Alexander of Network Rail described the Reference Design process that was implemented to elicit the GB specific requirements for the configuration of the ETCS product. This involved the production of some 31 documents to describe various aspects of operation on the GB railway and the ETCS capabilities to be applied to those. From these 31 documents 5 requirement sets were consolidated.

This presentation, by Alison Danahay, a Principal Systems Engineering and Integration Consultant at WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff, follows on from John’s and describes several toolsets developed by WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff to support and automate the processes for consolidation and documentation of the Reference Design itself and subsequent requirement specifications.

Alison Danahay is a professional Systems Engineer with 26+ years experience in engineering. She has been working with the Network Rail Safety Technical Engineering team on the definition of requirements to migrate current UK signalling and operations to ETCS Level 2.

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