TASCS

TASCS – TOWARDS A SUSTAINABLE CREWING SYSTEM
for the European Inland Waterway Transport

The Social Partners in the European Inland Waterway Transport (IWT) aim for the development of new manning requirements for vessel crewmembers on the European Inland Waterway Network.

At present, the leading manning regulation in force for Inland Waterway Transport is the Regulation for Rhine Navigating Personnel. The regulation dates back almost thirty years and has not been revised in depth ever since. The last three decades however have witnessed a lot of changes that impact on the sector – be it technological or non-technological changes. Therefore workload and recovery aspects of IWT crewmembers are being investigated in order to develop a documented proposal for an easy to use and easy to enforce manning instrument for the European IWT-system. The IWT sector is characterised by specific on-board working and living conditions, which cannot be compared with any other mode of transport. A harmonized European manning framework is desirable in order to improve labour mobility, and face the general demographic challenges.

Following a system based human factors design approach the overall system with its elements that contribute to the performance are being studied including at least the vessel and its crew, the organisation, customer, terminal, port, traffic control and enforcement. Workload is characterised by several physical and mental aspects including shift work and solo work.

Based on literature study and existing knowledge of the sector a standardised task analysis instrument has been developed for several types of vessels. Questions like safety, workload, task effectiveness, fatigue and recuperation are incorporated in the instrument. Among others it consists of an inventory of time occupancy on tasks, urge of task performance, subjective & expert assessment of physical and mental workload including specific remarks like amount of expertise needed, additional strenuous aspects like working with dangerous goods, needs for assistance etc. and recovery aspects.

With the help of this analysis instrument the crews of 50 vessels are interviewed in the frame of a field research. The results are evaluated interactively with and validated by end users in a workshop. An additional workshop with experts in the technological and non-technological domains delivered insight in future developments that will influence manning requirements.

Finally all these elements will result in a new sustainable crewing system taking into account relevant European regulations on working time, safety, standardised competencies and current technical, logistic and human factors standards and state of the art knowledge.

More information?
If you need more information about the vessel visits, please contact Berthold Holtmann:
holtmann@dst-org.de; Phone: +49 (0) 203 99369 55.