The role of data visualization in Railway Big Data Risk Analysis

Big Data Risk Analysis (BDRA) is one of the possible alleys for the further development of risk models in the railway transport. Big Data techniques allow a great quantity of information to be handled from different types of sources (e.g. unstructured text, signaling and train data). The benefits of this approach may lie in improving the understanding of the risk factors involved in railways, detecting possible new threats or assessing the risk levels for rolling stock, rail infrastructure or railway operations. For the efficient use of BDRA, the conversion of huge amounts of data into a simple and effective display is particularly challenging. Especially because it is presented to various specific target audiences. This work reports a literature review of risk communication and visualization in order to find out its applicability to BDRA, and beyond the visual techniques, what human factors have to be considered in the understanding and risk perception of the infor-mation when safety analysts and decision-makers start basing their decisions on BDRA analyses. It was found that BDRA requires different visualization strategies than those that have normally been carried out in risk analysis up to now.