Patrik Auf der Mauer

Andreas Fuhrer

(3440) Issues in Developing a Network-wide Track Management System for the Swiss Railway

Technical long talk 50 min

Thursday, 2008-06-26, 12:00 - 12:50, Arena 6

• Patrik Auf der Mauer - Netcetera (speaker)
• Andreas Fuhrer - SBB (co-speaker)
• Jürg Straub - Netcetera (co-speaker)

Topics

• Eclipse RCP
• Software engineering lifecycle
• Real-world experiences and show cases

Download the presentation

Abstract

The Swiss National Rail system was established in a popular referendum in 1898, 
where it was agreed to merge the numerous existing regional railways into a 
single state-owned system. Currently, there are about 285 million travellers and 
60 million tons of goods moved per year, between 824 stations, over 3000 km of 
standard gauge track and with a punctuality record (within 5 min) of 96.2%.

One of the great many coordinated activities needed to be exectued for providing 
such quality of service is the long term planning and management of the 
network-wide track system. Increasingly, traditional planning and management 
tasks are able to benefit from the support of specialized computer software.

This talk describes the ongoing development of the long term network-wide track 
management system - NeTS (Netzweites Trassensystem) being commissionned and 
coordinated by the Swiss Railway and executed in conjunction with a group of 
collaborating partner firms.

Technically, the product consists of an enterprise database back office 
supplying data to teams of planning agents - each using a custom graphical 
Eclipse RCP-based interactive track, route, and schedule viewer/editor. 
Organizationally, the project is being designed, planned and realized by 
multiple firms working together on-site in close collaboration with internal 
railway domain experts. In addition to the software engineering design and 
development processes employed, the product's success also relies on the 
organizational and interactional processes used in this collaborative 
development.

A rough outline of the talk is planned as follows:

 - Introduction
   - Breakdown/structure of resource planning at the Swiss Railway
   - Background of Track Management
   - Specific tasks NeTS should support

 - Project Setup
   - Collaboration between multiple firms
   - On-site development
   - Iterative Design via regular Interviews with domain experts
   - Multiple stakeholders - one team

 - Iterative Development
   - Specific setup in project
   - Advantages/Disadvantages
   - Bottlenecks (e.g. accses to business analysts)

 - Domain and Technical requirements and solutions
  - Current system layout
  - Requirements of new system
  - Approach to solution
  - Technologies used

 - Demo of current version

 - Future work