Emergency Response Capability Assessment for Dispatching Personnel on Fully Automated Urban Rail Lines The Case of Zhengzhou Metro Line 5

Fully automated operation (FAO) concentrates the critical risks of urban rail transit within the operations control center (OCC), posing unprecedented demands on the emergency response capabilities of dispatching personnel. Existing research, predominantly focused on traditional operational models, has largely overlooked the quantitative assessment of human factors, such as dispatcher cognition and decision making in FAO systems. To address this research gap, this study establishes a human factors–based evaluation framework for FAO dispatcher emergency capabilities, encompassing five dimensions: resource planning, situational awareness, organizational management, information processing, and workload processing capability. An empirical analysis was conducted using the “7.20” extreme rainstorm disaster on the Zhengzhou Metro as a case study. The results indicated that the overall emergency response capability of dispatchers was at a moderate- to high risk level. Specifically, resource planning capability was identified as the most critical vulnerability, exhibiting the highest risk intensity and most significant systematic deficiencies. Furthermore, notable fluctuations and shortcomings were identified in situational awareness, organizational management, and information-processing capabilities. Workload processing capability, although exhibiting a moderate to high risk level, displayed the lowest entropy among all dimensions, indicating that workload-related vulnerabilities were uniformly and systematically experienced across roles and shifts. This study precisely identifies key human-factor vulnerabilities in FAO emergency response, providing a data-driven foundation for optimizing dispatcher training programs and enhancing the safety and resilience of urban rail transit systems.