Teleoperation in Rail and Tram Systems: A Scoping Review on Work Design, Roles, Tasks, and Human–Machine Interfaces

As rail transport becomes increasingly automated, ensuring effective human fallback solutions is critical to safety and performance. Teleoperation enables remote intervention, but research on human roles, work places, and performance is fragmented. This scoping review maps current concepts and technologies for teleoperation in rail and tram systems, emphasizing the central roles of human operators and human–machine interface design. This results in an in-depth synthesis of teleoperation studies and identification of key task clusters. Following PRISMA guidelines, a systematic literature search was conducted in five databases. Of 505 unique publications, 71 met the inclusion criteria after title and abstract screening. After full-text analysis, 59 studies were included and categorized into teleoperation (n = 21) and control room contexts (n = 38). Results reveal a wide variety of publications from various perspectives on teleoperation in the rail domain. Included studies ranged from prototype workplaces and interface concepts to task and activity analyses. However, validated performance metrics, comparative studies, and consistent theoretical grounding remain scarce. ... mehrThe findings highlight the need to better integrate human factors, ergonomics, and system design in future research on railway teleoperation.