Features

Controlling the Swiss Rail System

2010 Chairman's Award for Excellence Recipient

A superprecise dispatching system designed and implemented by the Swiss Federal Railway (SBB) with CSC is helping them run like clockwork. The Rail Control System (RCS) was developed over four and a half years by a team of about 100 rail and technology experts. CSC’s Matthias Krista, Benedikt Soom, Frédéric Auberson and Gilles Iachelini played key roles in the architecture, business analytics and software implementation.

RCS is a powerful solution for analyzing complex interactions between trains and providing fast, accurate operational data to dispatchers, ultimately keeping trains on time and passengers happy.

RCS provides near-real-time information on the current operational status of approximately 2,000 trains and 3,000 kilometers of track, and their corresponding switches and signals in the Swiss Federal Railways system. Overall punctuality has improved from 94 percent to 96 percent, making Switzerland the leader in international punctuality statistics.

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With RCS, timetables can be denser, allowing more throughputs, and traffic forecasts are more accurate. This enables dispatchers to detect conflicts and reroute trains quickly. RCS is the only known system of its kind that manages extremely detailed data, for a network the size of the Swiss railway, using sophisticated algorithms that deliver data updates to dispatchers within one second.

Accurate forcasting

One of the chief innovations of RCS is more accurate forecasting. A specialized algorithm was devised for forecasting simultaneous train journeys for all trains, including a highly efficient method for calculating the networkwide impact of delays.

The system is able to:

• Receive and handle several hundred messages per second from different peripheral systems (e.g., timetables, train position sensors)
• Process these messages within a fraction of a second
• Calculate train journey forecasts
• Deliver the resulting changes to hundreds of railway dispatchers and customer systems.

To do this, RCS uses a fast, message-oriented architecture, data grid technology, and high-speed graphical user interfaces. Once messages from peripheral systems are received, they are forwarded to core server components, which handle several thousand messages per second.

A temporal subset of the data is stored in an in-memory data grid. This unique design means that database queries can be substituted with high-performance object queries distributed across the grid. Queries are executed in parallel, improving performance by up to an order of magnitude versus a traditional database query. This “database on steroids” can be scaled up by simply adding compute servers at a fraction of the cost of an additional database server.

Data reaches the dispatcher at a workplace consisting of eight high-resolution monitors. The Java-based application provides the main functions for train dispatching. Monitors are powered by innovative client and graphical user interface software that processes and displays data in near real time. The software displays the results of intensive parallel processing of detailed business data, such as track occupancy data and connection timetables, and redraws up to 18.4 million pixels per second.