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Post by philthetube on Dec 7, 2020 23:47:43 GMT
Instead of having everything going through the train management system would it have been better to just let that be concerned with the mechanical running of the train and have the passenger information systems away from that, ideally on a drivers tablet.
Big advantages I can see are that it would allow easy changes to information provided to passengers,particularly during engineering works. This could just be downloaded wirelessly to the tablet when the driver booked on without any actions needed by the driver.
It would also be possible for all duties and timetables to be loaded and for it to display how the train is doing for time, relevant on some of the outer sections with infrequent services.
This may also take some obsolescence out of the system as, hopefully, when technology changes it would just be necessary to develop a new app.
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Post by class411 on Dec 8, 2020 9:11:13 GMT
It rather depends on whether or not the train management system is written to run under an operating system, or rather communicate directly with the hardware.
If it's been written to run under an operating system such as Unix, the various sub-systems will all be isolated from one another and easily replaced (or added to*) one at a time.
* That assumes that there are spare physical ports to connect to any new sub-system's interface controller.
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Post by t697 on Dec 8, 2020 9:54:27 GMT
Instead of having everything going through the train management system would it have been better to just let that be concerned with the mechanical running of the train and have the passenger information systems away from that, ideally on a drivers tablet. Big advantages I can see are that it would allow easy changes to information provided to passengers,particularly during engineering works. This could just be downloaded wirelessly to the tablet when the driver booked on without any actions needed by the driver. It would also be possible for all duties and timetables to be loaded and for it to display how the train is doing for time, relevant on some of the outer sections with infrequent services. This may also take some obsolescence out of the system as, hopefully, when technology changes it would just be necessary to develop a new app. Something to give more flexibility and quicker updates of Passenger Information is specified for the new Tube fleets. As for S stock, something to assess for a mid life tech upgrade?
Meantime, the Real Time Information facility is being restored to S stock allowing messages to be added to the passenger announcements in a targetted way by Line Information Specialists. A huge library of messages and phrases. Messages can be added to or replace normal announcements at specific stations or station approaches as needed on a temporary basis.
I know, yet more wittering from the announcements.... LIS's and managers will need to be sparing!
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Post by class411 on Dec 8, 2020 10:07:32 GMT
I know, yet more wittering from the announcements.... LIS's and managers will need to be sparing! It might be helpful if they adopted a different 'chime' for messages that involved some change to normal running (which could include SDO messages). That way we could read our books, safely ignoring the 'This is an X line train to Y the next station is Z, change here for a,b,c, and d' messages, if we knew our journey. |
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Post by t697 on Dec 8, 2020 10:15:57 GMT
I know, yet more wittering from the announcements.... LIS's and managers will need to be sparing! It might be helpful if they adopted a different 'chime' for messages that involved some change to normal running (which could include SDO messages). That way we could read our books, safely ignoring the 'This is an X line train to Y the next station is Z, change here for a,b,c, and d' messages, if we knew our journey. Won't be in the next update, but a good idea. We can explore how it might be done. I think not super difficult to automatically add a 'ding dong' to the start of relevant messages. It would favour those able to hear the audio announcements over those primarily relying on visual announcements, but possibly not to the extent of being an RVAR non-compliance. |
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Post by dm1 on Dec 8, 2020 13:49:32 GMT
That's common practice elsewhere. You could in theory "replicate" the chime using a special symbol (e.g. a warning symbol) a the the beginning and end of the special announcements on the DMI, although that is obviously slightly less useful than a chime as it requires somebody to be looking at the screen, but should be enough for RVAR.
What's also helpful is using a different voice for unusual announcements - either a male voice, since the S-Stock generally uses a female voice, or just a different female voice.
In many other systems it's common practice for staff in the control centre (I don't know what their exact title is) to record announcements about any disruption on the fly, then broadcast them to trains and stations. That also works quite well, but ideally requires those staff to have some level of diction training to ensure they are properly understandable.
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Post by Chris L on Dec 8, 2020 15:01:42 GMT
People wearing earphones and headphones often miss announcements.
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rincew1nd
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Post by rincew1nd on Dec 8, 2020 19:30:07 GMT
What's also helpful is using a different voice for unusual announcements - either a male voice, since the S-Stock generally uses a female voice, or just a different female voice. Doesn't the S-Stock already do this? A female voice for the routine stuff and male for the "alert" messages. |
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Post by t697 on Dec 8, 2020 21:14:08 GMT
What's also helpful is using a different voice for unusual announcements - either a male voice, since the S-Stock generally uses a female voice, or just a different female voice. Doesn't the S-Stock already do this? A female voice for the routine stuff and male for the "alert" messages. No, all female voiced at the moment on S stock except for 'Mind the Gap between the train and the platform.'. We'll have to see for the future  One potential problem with the idea is that you'd be limited in assembling messages from differently voiced words and phrases if the voices were markedly different. New female voices have been chosen so as to be similar to existing vioce(s) in the S stock library. I suppose one could use a specific different voice for all the SDO scripts for example. A lot of work though to re-record the 3000 or so 'real time information' phrases and message fragments.
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Post by t697 on Dec 8, 2020 21:19:25 GMT
That's common practice elsewhere. You could in theory "replicate" the chime using a special symbol (e.g. a warning symbol) a the the beginning and end of the special announcements on the DMI, although that is obviously slightly less useful than a chime as it requires somebody to be looking at the screen, but should be enough for RVAR. What's also helpful is using a different voice for unusual announcements - either a male voice, since the S-Stock generally uses a female voice, or just a different female voice. In many other systems it's common practice for staff in the control centre (I don't know what their exact title is) to record announcements about any disruption on the fly, then broadcast them to trains and stations. That also works quite well, but ideally requires those staff to have some level of diction training to ensure they are properly understandable. I'm aware that's how special announcements for stations are done. We don't currently have the data bandwidth to send to trains in that form. It's much simpler, a data packet with codes for when and where the message plays and the phrase id's making up the message. Again, next generation will be different. |
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Post by zbang on Dec 9, 2020 21:10:21 GMT
It rather depends on whether or not the train management system is written to run under an operating system, or rather communicate directly with the hardware. (Sorry, I'm late.) I don't know specifically, but depending on all the tasks it handles, it's quite likely that the TMS does run with an operating system, but that OS is more likely to be a real-time OS like QNX or VxWorks than a general-purpose one like linux or WinCE. Very few systems run "on the metal" anymore.
If it were me, and it isn't, I'd put the passenger info/announcements/etc on a completely separate platform from actual train operations/management.
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