Railcar Management

A notebook

Railcar Management turned the day’s printed plan into a board that changes as the yard moves. The board shown here is a model, built from invented data.

Notes2
The board, sketched3
The plan, alive4
The day, on paper5
Try it6
The plan on a display7
The plan in a hand8
The yard and the plan9
In short10

A petrochemical rail yard ran on paper. I stood in it across shifts, then designed the two apps that replaced the printout: one for gloved hands in the weather, one for the people scheduling them inside.

1Railcar Management

Notes

A railcar arrives full of petrochemical waste. It is parked on a track, matched to a machine and a silo, emptied, cleaned and sent back out.
The shifts mostly do not overlap, and the shift change was where the expensive failures happened.
The board has a lane for each track and machine, a block for each car, and a line for now.
The same screens run on displays in the warehouses and silos, and each zone shows its own part.
Outside, the operators use a phone app designed for gloved hands. This notebook shows one of its screens, the tracks.
This notebook is a model. The yard, cars, products, shifts and rules on these pages are invented, and none of it comes from the client.

2Notes

The board, sketched

Figure 1. A sketch of the board in this model: a lane for each track and machine, blocks for the cars, and a line for now.

3Railcar Management

Chapter 1

The plan, alive

In the yard, the day’s plan was a printout, out of date as soon as the yard moved. At the shift change, what one crew had learned was passed on by word of mouth or on a sheet.

The desktop side of the project made that plan a board: what each track and machine holds over the day, and where every railcar is. This notebook does not show that board. It shows a model of one, written from the case study, with an invented yard, invented cars and invented rules for what does not fit.

4The plan, alive

The day, on paper

Car	Arrives	Waits on	Unloaded by	Cleaned in
An invented yard: four tracks, three unloaders, one cleaning bay
X-101	06:10	T1 06:10	A 07:00	C1 08:00
X-102	06:25	T1 06:25	A 08:00	C1 09:00
X-103	06:40	T2 06:40	B 07:00	C1 10:00
X-104	07:00	T3 07:00	C 09:00	C1 11:00
X-105	07:30	T2 07:30	A 09:30	C1 12:00
X-106	08:00	T3 08:00	B 08:30	C1 13:00
X-107	09:00	T4 09:00	C 10:30	C1 14:00
X-108	12:30	T3 12:30	C 13:30*	C1 15:00

This is the printout. It is correct at the moment it is printed and does not change after that. In this model the late shift starts at 14:00 and has only the paper. The one block marked with a star runs across that shift change: it is work the early shift hands to the late one.

Table 1. The printed plan for an invented yard, in a model written from the case study, not from the product. Each cell is a track or machine and a start time; a star marks work handed over at the 14:00 shift change.

5Railcar Management

Try it

print the plan at 08:00by zone, as on the displays

Figure 2. A model of the board on an invented yard, written from the case study, not the product. Drag a block along the day or onto another lane.

6Try it

The plan on a display

Railcar Management dashboard: the yard’s total and occupancy bars, ring gauges for cars on site, in transit and weeks scheduled, a September calendar, a strip of unit and silo tiles and cars released by weekday.

Plate 1. The plan as a wall display for a zone: what is on site, what is coming, what is scheduled, and which units and silos are busy. The figures are the design’s own.

7Railcar Management

The plan in a hand

Railcar Management on a phone: tabs for each yard and five track cards, each with a fill bar, its full, empty and scheduled counts, the last one red and full.

Plate 2. The same plan on a phone: a count per track, how full it is, and how much work is scheduled on it. The figures are the design’s own.

8The plan in a hand

The yard and the plan

Figure 3. The invented yard of this model, from above: four tracks off one lead, three unloaders, the silos and the cleaning bay. The plan gives each car a place here and a time.

1The yard: tracks, unloaders, silos, the cleaning bay.
2The plan, which gives each car a place and a time and shows it on the displays.

9Railcar Management

In short

In the model, moving a block recomputes the conflicts, and a printout made earlier shows which of its lines are now out of date.

This model is not the project’s system and uses no data from it.

The rest of the project is in the case study: the rest of the phone app, the safety checks inside the flow, and the pilot with a few operators.

the case study

another notebook VdlC

notebooks

10In short