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By Chris Douglas FHWA, Nevada DOT and ITS Nevada cosponsored a Human Factors in Traffic Management Center design seminar on Monday August 28th. It was an all day event presented by Dennis Folds and W. Bradley Fain of Georgia Tech. Dennis and Bradley are the authors of the research report "Preliminary Human Factors Guidelines for Traffic Management Centers". The course covered the basics of human factors, answering questions like what is human factors and why is it important. Human factors covers a wide territory and is defined as collecting data on the physical and mental characteristics, capabilities, limitations, and propensities of people and using this information to design and evaluate tools, workplaces, and other things that people use with the goal of increasing their efficiency, comfort, and safety. More simply, it is making the job fit the operator.
-Analysis of Requirements The discussion of these components gave an in depth view of how to implement human factors in design. With this established, Dennis and Bradley got a chance to show off
their website. The ErgoTMC
website has extensive information regarding human factors. It includes
the full electronic version of the "Preliminary Human Factors Guidelines
for Traffic Management Centers". Beyond the extensive search engine
it also features several existing TMCs and the software that they use
to manage their systems. The site can be found at http://ergotmc.gtri.gatech.edu. Lastly, the seminar covered how to conduct a human engineering program for a TMC. Bradley and Dennis emphasized the importance of going beyond analysis at the end of the project and working towards implementation of human engineering principles throughout the project. This will yield the best results. The tools for how this can and should be done are found at the ErgoTMC website. Acknowledgments to Greg Novak and Nazy Sobhi from the FHWA and Keith Maki and Mike Quintero of NDOT for organizing the event.
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Human
Factors in TMC Design Seminar Report 
After
the basics were covered the presenters discussed the critical components
of human factors.
