Project Summary
This project will develop technology that can automatically determine a caller’s train anywhere in Great Britain, enabling a faster and more informed response, making railways safer and increasing passenger confidence.
Project Achievements
Activities • We carried out an assessment of user needs to determine the ideal user experience and related technical requirements. • We did research and market analysis to inform a longer-term commercial and technical roadmap. • We focused on improving and testing Signalbox algorithms that precisely match a snapshot of location data to a specific train in a railway environment. • We designed, built and iterated a minimum viable product (MVP) that was launched online for beta testing.
Conclusions
We released an MVP to map.signalbox.io to demonstrate the feasibility of using a snapshot of location data to search for a live train and refine results by filtering with simple questions. We carried out internal testing and found that the technology and algorithm matched location data to a train in 98% of instances, and converged on a single train without ambiguity in 79% of tests. This demonstrates that Signalbox can be used to enhance incident response on Britain’s rail network by saving call handlers time when callers on a train are unable to describe their location.
Next Steps
We will demonstrate to the product potential users to gather feedback from key stakeholders. We will secure a visit to a control room environment where Signalbox staff can use the application alongside existing applications to optimise the usefulness, reliability and permanence of the application in a real-world test environment. We will create a product development roadmap (front and back-end) to improve coverage and reliability, and respond to feedback from stakeholders.
