Application and content management framework for railway operators Dr. Bruno Volckaert – Ghent University / iMinds (Belgium)

Large # of applications Unreliable Connectivity

Cause: diverse fleet (manual) software maintenance 12/09/2018 Cause: diverse fleet (manual) software maintenance Train: out of service Train: into depot Engineer: go to train Engineer: file upload from storage Engineer: local test Train: back in service

RAILS framework TRACK RAILS 12/09/2018 Automation in railway application & data management Robust distributed system Software execution environment Software provisioning platform Software lifecycle management Robustness and reliability Legacy integration Built on solid technology Small requirements, low footprint while running

Software execution environment RAILS Platform Wayside server Train node

Software execution environment Apps Core apps & services RAILS

Core applications and services Core apps & services Advanced remote administration Connectivity service Reliable messaging service Persistence service And many more…

Automated provisioning Application Media Data Calculate target devices Calculate target devices Calculate target devices

Administrator overview of provisioning Module store Hot-updating (while driving) Context-aware scheduling Due date Available connection Timetable information

Dealing with limited bandwidth: delta provisioning

Module lifecycle and dependency management

Robust and reliable Server unavailability: auto-relocation of clients Nodes are built for unreliable connections Outgoing data is queued Data sent once connected

Other notable features Legacy applications inherently supported Built on proven technology OSGi, Java, RESTful services, JSON Small resource footprint RAILS base platform installation Node (e.g. train): < 20 MB Module Store: < 20 MB Server : < 25 MB Memory usage while running is < 256MB

Conclusions and future work Scalable and robust software / data management framework for railway operators Research solution integrated in iSync by Televic RAIL, deployed in e.g. Eurostar fleet Calgary (Siemens) Translink (CAF) MUNI light rail San Francisco (Siemens) Current research Extending application / data management towards train sensor layer Rapid application / data flow development through LimeDS (https://limeds.intec.ugent.be)

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME Questions? Contact information: bruno.volckaert@intec.ugent.be LinkedIn: https://be.linkedin.com/in/bvolckae