Tomorrow's Railway and Climate Change Adaptation Final Report

and open data systems. The user scope for this assessment is broad and includes local/
specific (maintenance workforce, RAMs and REMs), operational (Network Rail, RAMS),
strategic (ORR, DfT) and socio-political (public, government) users.
Delivering capability through technology requires an integrated approach that
incorporates other factors. These include technical infrastructure (hardware and
software), process, standards and education throughout any organisation to fully realise
the benefits of spatially enabled WRCC decision support tools.
Early adoption of technologies should help the industry make a significant shift in
increasing resilience to climate change, aided by investments in staff competencies,
organisational structure and embedded processes and standards. This will drive a more
informed response to daily weather and climate change.
Data interoperability presents challenges and opportunities in delivering future weather
and environmental hazards assessment. Deployment of data technologies outside the
rail industry will make it necessary to adopt new techniques. Ingesting data from
multiple sources (interoperably) will form a core activity in future.
Dissemination of information across Network Rail IM assets is expected. Currently this
comprises a combination of desktop and mobile platform use, with stakeholders
engaging with data via textual and spatial interfaces. Integrated system(s) for delivering
the information via intranet and internet services are proposed. These are in line with
the current trend towards web service-provision of spatial informatics, as well as web
enabled visualisation and analysis tools.
The growth of data services is expected to continue and this has ongoing implications for
the costs behind how the rail industry sources its data. The use of open data formats is
recommended. This should help to stem rising costs associated with data ingestion,
translation and management.
The most significant expected change for rail industry stakeholders will be the need for
individuals’ user skills to develop in line with the changing nature of data services and
analytical opportunities. The user experience at the different systems-of-systems levels
is likely to require a degree of expertise not previously considered. The availability of
data relating to Network Rail assets will require users to make more expert judgement
based decisions. In turn, these require a clearer understanding of what the data is
capable of. We expect that as data availability and quality continues to increase, users
will generate the skills and confidence to query and analyse the data in a far more
proactive and interrogative manner. To enable this, the rail industry requires tools that
will offer a robust analytical platform as well as visualisation capabilities.
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