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

2. Large # of applications Unreliable Connectivity

3. 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

4. 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

5. Software execution environment
RAILS
Platform
Wayside server
Train node

6. Software execution environment
Apps
Core apps & services
RAILS

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

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

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

10. Dealing with limited bandwidth: delta provisioning

11. Module lifecycle and dependency management

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

13. 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

14. 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 (

15. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME Questions?
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