Tangible interactions in control centres for railway traffic management
Résumé
A current trend in rail industry control centres is to move towards an increase in the number of digital
tools to assist operators. Our observations show that the information used by rail controllers is distributed
among different interfaces. Operators must assemble all this information themselves to understand the
state of the system. This task is often done mentally, resulting in difficult information sharing and a
slower decision process. It is in this search for improvement of the operational centres that we realized
a prototype of a tangible touch table presented in this article. The first tests are underway and allow
us to have rather positive feedback on this technology that operators are not familiar with. The next
iterations will focus on refining the prototype and on experimenting with a larger group of users.