NEOM “The Spine” Railway: Programme-Level Human Factors

The project

NEOM is a $500 Billion smart city currently in development in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Railway Infrastructure serving the 170 km-long city is planned to include metro and high-speed railway – both passenger and freight mobility – running throughout and connecting with nearby ports.

What we did

SEMP was requested to provide Human Factors (HF) expertise on behalf of the acquiring Authority/ Asset Owner, NEOM Land Mobility, and additionally to  support early HF analyses and delivery obligations performed by the lead design/engineering consultant. HF support needed to address integration challenges and delivery packages including all railway infrastructure; rolling stock, passenger and freight stations, automated logistics transfer operations, control rooms; depots and other lineside facilities.

SEMP was responsible for developing program-level assurance artefacts, including an overarching HF Integration Plan and an Alarms Management Philosophy.
SEMP then led early HF Integration activities to help mitigate risk and to demonstrate a pragmatic and risk-based assurance approach, suitable for the early
stage-gate submissions.

Our role also included:

• Planning/ strategy inputs
• Specialist technical support and guidance during multi-disciplinary workshops
• Closely working alongside specialists representing Fire Life Safety, System Safety and Engineering Design.

Our scope

SEMP’s scope specifically included:

• Revising the Human Factors Integration Plan (HFIP) to align with related assurance plans and acknowledge integration challenges within the agreed delivery model.
  Developing preliminary HF analysis and reporting, demonstrating a human-centred approach to analysis and scalable reporting for all Design Work Packages.
• Identifying best practice guidance and lessons learnt to support safe evacuations, drawing on industry lessons for tunnel emergency infrastructure and identifying behavioural considerations pertinent to the design.
• Supporting assurance workshops; Day In The Life; Fire Life Safety; HAZID/HAZOP and OSHA; Operations Concept and Maintenance Concept development.
  Reviewing concept design artifacts, providing detailed feedback on design submissions, capturing issues and scoping analysis and assurance requirements.
  Managing HF issues, acting as focal point for HF issues and HF Integration discussions, ensuring traceability to derived requirements and hazards.

The results

NEOM’s progressive development included engineering/ systems/ operational concepts exhibiting different levels of maturity; particularly between the civil engineering and rail systems packages. The early HF strategy deliberately drew on similar contemporary systems wherever possible in order to document
provisional task expectations and to allow front-loaded consideration of error potential.

This approach helped identify integration risks to support the development of a resilient system/ operation. Early HF issues raised helped the program to design out risks and to improve alignment between civil infrastructure, rail systems specifications, and the future operation.