Keeping complex systems on track

There is a significant difference between tinkering with your uncle’s car and managing nearly 700 engineers on one of the world’s busiest metropolitan railway systems. But that is how Kuldeep Gharatya FREng, Head of Engineering for major programmes in Transport for London (TfL), turned his mechanical engineering qualification into a plan to bring the concepts of systems engineering into modern railway engineering. 

Gharatya had a typical introduction to engineering. Maths and physics were always his best subjects at school. However, apart from his brother-in-law, there were no engineering role models in the family. Indeed, he confesses that he didn’t have much of an idea of what engineering was about. When it came to a degree course, he wanted to do something useful. “I knew that engineering was quite creative. It was to do with problem-solving, but also rewarding.” 

As a Londoner, Gharatya looked local and enrolled on a mechanical engineering course at the University of Westminster, followed by a year at UCL studying for a graduate diploma in mechanical engineering. He remained in the city for his first job as a graduate mechanical engineer with London Underground (LU), where he worked to keep trains running and on projects such as the Jubilee Line extension.

A systems approach

As Gharatya became familiar with LU, he observed the importance of the different engineering systems needing to work together to deliver the required outcome. He began to see how LU could benefit from a systems engineering approach. At the time, this way of seeing engineering projects on a grander scale was relatively new.

Working with different departments he “could see that there was not enough communication between the disciplines”. This led to some “siloed thinking”, he adds, and this was happening in an increasingly complicated world. “Our signalling systems and trains themselves were becoming more complex. The city itself was becoming more complex. Our ridership was growing at a significant rate. It was unsustainable for us to deliver over four million people a day on a Victorian system without significant investment in the infrastructure. It was a perfect storm of increasing demand, increasing expectations, increasing complexity, and operating at the edge of the performance boundary in a tightly coupled system. We needed to think about this very, very differently.” 

Gharatya thought that LU could benefit from systems engineering. The concept had been around for about half a century but it didn’t begin to take root until the 1990s and had yet to make it into engineering education. In 2004 Gharatya enrolled on a master’s degree in systems engineering at UCL’s Centre for Systems Engineering. There, he worked with engineers from defence and aerospace companies, such as Boeing, Airbus, the Ministry of Defence, and BAE Systems. “It was great talking to them because it … makes you realise that we all suffer the same challenges. It doesn’t matter what the industry is.”

Gharatya returned to LU and started to embed systems engineering into the organisation. Still a novel idea at the time, it was one of the first rail operators to formally take on the approach with a dedicated team. 

When asked for his own potted description of systems engineering, Gharatya replies: “You’ve put me on the spot.” The problem starts with the title. “Systems engineering isn’t about just engineering. It’s about the whole system, which includes people, the environment... It includes a lot of people who aren’t engineers, the people who use the system, the people who funded the system, I could carry on”.

Gharatya recalls another attempt to explain what he did. “I remember saying, it’s like, common sense. But, like my dad used to say … the thing about common sense is it’s not very common.”

Gharatya admits that he too had started with an engineering focus. He recalls his keynote speech in 2005 when he had concentrated on the importance of systems engineering for transport. Five years on, his view had changed to “it’s not about systems engineering, it’s about systems thinking”. It must start at policy, government, all the way down through to delivery. 

His view is that the ‘engineering’ in the title has held back the adoption of systems engineering for the past 20 years. It made people think “that’s just something for the engineers to do, and not for us”. Systems engineering demands a fundamentally different approach to projects. He believes in spending as much time as possible “in the problem domain”, planning what you have to do, before rushing into “the solution domain”. You have to think 90% planning and 10% implementation, “because the cost is in the implementation”.

To him the case is obvious. “If you look at major programmes around the world, from nuclear, aerospace, transport, HS2, Crossrail, or the Northern line extension, they are incredibly complex systems. If we hope to deliver them efficiently, effectively, and achieving the outcomes that we originally prescribed, we must be very, very good at systems engineering.”

Gharatya soon became recognised as LU’s resident systems engineer. “What I’m known for really is helping transport, rail specifically, embrace systems engineering.” He became the systems engineer in LU’s Engineering Directorate in 2004. Then, Head of Systems Integration and the Systems Engineering Manager of its largest programme in 2007. 

Never one to blow his own trumpet, Gharatya does not make grand claims for the billions saved over the years through systems engineering. Instead, he jokes that the benefits have been in reduction or avoidance in cost and time overruns, which, when looking back, is always hard to quantify. He is also modest about his own role and instead refers to his teams when describing the rise of systems engineering at LU.

Integrated engineering

The work of the systems team came into its own when LU was delivering the Victoria Line upgrade, which would increase the frequency of trains. It had to prevent overheating through the energy used. Heat has been a longstanding issue for the underground, particularly when aiming to run more trains in certain sections. “We were optimising the system in such a way that we were not using the additional power originally forecast and thus weren’t generating heat that invariably would need to be removed. We were able to run 36 trains an hour on the Victoria line, one of the most intensive services in Western Europe. This optimisation saved hundreds of millions of pounds in whole life costs and gave an entirely new perspective on trying to understand how to cool the tube.” 

The engineers could change the operating regime thanks to their ability to build complex models of the network and simulate various strategies for running it. “There’s always been some form of modelling and simulation, but we really did push that to ever more complexity, ever more systems, [and] integrating those. Instead of having separate simulation capabilities, we wanted an integrated facility, an integrated simulation capability. Then that was extended to creating 3D virtual environments.” 

That laid the foundation for the use of virtual reality that allowed engineers to ‘walk around’ in the environment that they were preparing to build. “They could spot things that didn’t feel right,” Gharatya explains. This approach came into its own when LU wanted to reline the tunnel between Bond Street and Baker Street without having to shut down the line (see box ‘Open data’).

Learning from others

When LU became part of TfL, Gharatya took on the role of Head of Innovation, Technical Strategy, System Performance and Engineering Services. The new head of innovation role grew out of the rise of systems thinking at LU. The position was another way of encouraging engineers to look at the bigger picture and see what they could do for the business. 

When it came to innovation, LU didn’t have a big R&D budget, Gharatya explains, but by drawing on external funding, from Innovate UK for example, it could create consortia of people who could work together. “What was enjoyable was creating those consortiums, often with people that we’d not worked with, people who have not worked in our industry.” It was a way of introducing them to a different area of potential growth for their business, he adds. Another innovation at TfL was the rise of international consulting. Gharatya explains that this was a way of exposing TfL’s engineers to transport systems and supply chains in other countries. Working in Singapore and advising other cities on their metro systems was a way of “broadening the horizons of the individuals that were involved, leading them to deliver even bigger and better things when they came back”. 

Gharatya now sees his current role, overseeing major projects, as being to “enable our engineers to deliver the brilliant capital infrastructure that this city needs”. Systems engineering is now down to the “brilliant systems engineers who are leading that”. 

Gharatya has taken on newer tasks. For him, climate change is one of the biggest challenges. “We have a real focus on climate adaptation. That’s filtered into the design process. That’s something I’m incredibly proud of as an organisation.” Again, the aim is to see that ‘climate thinking’ pervades the system at TfL. “All our engineers have access, and many of them have a full day’s carbon literacy training. We’ve committed to that.” Decarbonisation and sustainability are also a part of TfL’s corporate targets and programme delivery process. 

Gharatya also sees TfL’s environmental credentials as crucial to its ability to recruit engineers. “From a skills agenda perspective, it’s also become a reason why people would like to join an engineering company.” Showing that you take environmental issues seriously is the key to attracting good talent. “The carbon credentials of any organisation will be, I think, a discriminator. If we can show a path to sustainability, not just building things, but improving the environment that we live in, if we can draw that parallel… why wouldn’t they want to become an engineer?”

Then there is the added attraction that TfL’s rail engineers can see the positive effects of their work. “We have the pull of being in a really exciting place, and people being able to see their efforts actually being implemented.” Gharatya puts it in personal terms. “I have helped change the city that I was born in, the city that I love. And some of those changes will be there for a very long time. And that’s not me on my own, of course. That’s my teams.”

Gharatya will soon have an opportunity to see just how universal his views on skills and systems engineering are beyond the rail sector. He will soon change transport modes when he takes up the role of Technical Services Director at NATS, the UK’s leading provider of air traffic control services. Again, he sees this in the context of the bigger system, and challenges of cities and mobility. “Those challenges don’t just restrict themselves to the physical landscape of a city.”

The UK has some of the most congested and complex airspace in the world, and inevitably in the future we will see greater use of drones and vertical take-off and landing craft. “We already have some of the best air traffic control systems and people in the world,” he says. “But we can’t stand still. What we’ve got to do is understand what that journey looks like in delivering the next phase of modernisation. For me, I think it’s going to be an incredibly exciting time.” 

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This article has been adapted from "Keeping complex systems on track", which originally appeared in the print edition of Ingenia 96 (September 2023).