Internship 6 month Railway System Engineer Alarm Modeling and Visualization

Internship Context

In a complex urban metro system alarm management plays a key role in ensuring the smooth operation of the line. Alarms enable operators to monitor the system and contribute to maintaining its availability and performance. They are also an essential tool for identifying and managing degraded situations allowing operators to respond effectively and minimize the impact on operations which is an important factor in passenger satisfaction.

In this context the objective of the internship will be to study the information made available to operators through Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) as well as the capabilities offered by these interfaces with the ultimate goal of designing alarms that effectively support line operations. A key challenge will be to establish the link between the system-level definition of alarms and the way they are presented to operators.

The intern will also contribute to defining a standard alarm list which will be displayed through a prototype HMI to demonstrate the different use cases associated with alarms. The prototype will need to be adaptable to the various Alstom products and urban transit solutions. This alarm list will serve as a basis for discussions and workshops with customers regarding the definition and use of operational alarms.

Main Responsibilities

The intern will be responsible for:

• analyzing the structure and content of the alarms defined in the alarm specification;

• studying the different mechanisms used to present alarms to operators including:

  • alarm banners;

  • the different views available across Alstom products depending on the urban transit solution;

  • any event-related views;

• analyzing the navigation capabilities available to operators within the HMI in order to identify and propose relevant features for operational alarms;

• defining a simple structured and easy-to-understand data model to represent the characteristics and lifecycle of an alarm;

• contributing to the integration of an HMI prototype for visualizing alarms their characteristics and their evolution throughout their lifecycle;

• identifying and proposing potential improvements to make alarms more relevant and useful for operators taking into account both existing and potential future functionalities.

Working Environment and Collaboration

This internship will involve collaboration across several teams. The intern will work closely with the System teams as well as the ATS (Automatic Train Supervision) teams. These interactions will help align system and customer needs with the capabilities offered by existing products and interfaces. So the candidate has to be fluent in French and English.