19 December 2016

Call for papers: "Critical Success Factors for Public Transportation"

For a special issue of the International Journal of System of Systems Engineering.

Public transportation is a representative example of system of systems and their serious challenges. The rising demands for integration of high-end technology in public transportation and offering services that are of operational excellence, ultimately safe, fully integrated with human factors, easily maintainable, fully reliable and robust are the significant challenges for service providers. Not only openness and dynamism of these systems but also the need for integration to other services make them highly complex.

To offer excellent services, special attention has to be paid to the operational environment and organisational culture. Next to reliable fleets, system operators play a key role in the quality of running services, and they need to have strong motivation. Thus the organisational leaders should explicitly aim for the monitoring and control of the operational culture in their organisations. Besides, technology offers possibilities for the continuous monitoring of systems and fast reactions. It offers frameworks for pluralistic approaches promoting awareness, share-understanding, training experts, effectively communicating systems concerns and supporting well-informed decisions.

Big data can provide uncountable benefits, but its architecture and communication remain a challenge. On the other side, the competitive environment of operation continuously challenges the currently established set up demanding for better services with lower costs. In this dynamic environment, it is important to recognise the key success indicators and keep balancing them. In other words, recognition of critical factors is of primary importance to successfully address these challenges.

This special issue aims to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss issues, challenges and future directions for successful public transportation, and share their R&D findings as well as their experience in related areas.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at the IEEE System of Systems Engineering Conference (SoSE), but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit articles for this call.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
  • Safety systems considerations for public transportation
  • Operational excellence principles for transportation systems
  • Collaborative risk assessment and mitigation
  • Model based systems engineering for excellence
  • Big data analytics and automation
  • Real-time monitoring, decisions and services
  • Resilience performances and error-prone operations
  • Human factors and organisational culture
  • Organisational leadership and operational culture
  • Reliability improvements and maintenance services
  • Maintenance execution and operations logistics
  • Technical Integrity of railway systems: track and rolling stock
  • Contracting new rolling stock and supply chain considerations
  • Life-cycle engineering and asset management in rail way track and rolling stock
  • Non-technical considerations in multi-stakeholder transportation systems
  • Digital technology and transportation as a service provider
  • Digital possibilities and future opportunities for public transportation

Important Dates
Manuscripts due by: 30 September, 2017

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