ABSTRACT
The subject of mental workload is an emotive topic that has and will continue to create much debate. How best to assess mental workload seems to produce divisions within the human factors community as the approaches to assessment reflect the variability in the interpretation of this concept. The first part of this chapter will summarise the early phases of work completed for Network Rail in reviewing the assessment of mental workload in the context of the railway signaller and developing an assessment approach. The latter part of this chapter will justify and describe the development of a checklist designed to capture the operational demand, one aspect of a signaller’s mental workload. It is currently used in the field by Network Rail to provide a profile of a signaller’s workstation signifying which entities within the system most impact upon the demand on the signaller.
