Our Work

Sound Transit’s Link Light Rail is quadrupling in size in the next several years, with a corresponding rise in operational challenges. To support the expanded system, the existing Link Control Center (LCC), which serves as the heart of their operations, must be upgraded and enhanced. The current industry practice is to physically expand facilities at a cost of millions of dollars.

With advancements in cloud services and communication tools, there is an opportunity to design and develop an innovative, enhanced control center that supports the necessary roles, processes, and data to ensure safe and efficient operations of the future expanded Link Light Rail system, potentially reducing the need to build additional physical facilities. We call this enhanced LCC the Unified Control Center (UCC).

The UCC is not an additional control tool; rather it brings together tools and capabilities

in an operational environment that supports new and existing workflows for the Link Light Rail system of the future.

When completed, the UCC Innovation Project will:

• Engage operators in a process that articulates enhanced workflows based on a shared understanding of future needs and the strengths and weaknesses of current workflows,
• Empower the operational community to guide the design and development of a unified control center that supports their expanding roles and processes,
• Employ a cloud-based infrastructure that enables virtual operations that mitigate current space constraints of the Link Control Center while enhancing performance, provide accurate and timely information for shared situational awareness and coordinated action among departments and partners addressing challenging situations,
• Explore embedding safety/security personnel with operations and maintenance employees in the UCC,
• Provide daily operational value that expands with the urgency of the situation, and
• Build trust and community through collaborative development of the UCC.

Using a community-centered approach, the project team will work with the operational groups at Sound Transit to design and develop a virtual environment to ensure safe and efficient operations of the expanded Link Light Rail system now and into the future.

This project will be conducted through a phased approach, with the initial phase focused on understanding the current and future LCC operational community workflows, producing early design concepts that can be used to check and assess intended functionality ahead of a potential Phase 2 portion of this project to further the work, and a strategic plan for the next phase that prepares for the iterative build to follow. At the conclusion of Phase 1, the ST-UW team and engaged stakeholders will be ready to:

• Establish the UCC infrastructure
• Import, manipulate, and display operational data
• Engage the operational community in UCC design-build cycles
• Achieve and iterate a UCC Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
• Construct an operational evaluation plan
• Launch a UCC model deployment
• Conduct an operational evaluation

This work is supported by Sound Transit.

Human Centered Design and Engineering

• Mark Haselkorn, Professor
• Bart Treece, Director, Mobility Innovation Center