Development of Software for Railway Incident Management

Customer

The Customer is a Dutch company – leader in the field of automated alerting and upscaling systems. The Company is a software supplier that specializes in emergency systems and communications technology which can primarily be used for support in case of a calamity, in particular for crisis preparation and crisis management. The Customer provides warning and notification systems, command & control technology, incident management software and data-analysis tools.

Challenge

The Customer decided to develop emergency solution for the needs of Dutch railroad operational centers based on existed automated alerting system. The railway incident management system was supposed to provide the possibility of emergency and congestion monitoring as well as management of its elimination.

Solution

ScienceSoft team developed customizable and extensible emergency system that was integrated with Unified Informing System as well as with location system, based on Google Map API. Different specific layers were added to the map, including ones with up to 400 railway stations, railroad capacity, emergency and volunteer centers.

The railway incident management system has various scenarios for actions in accordance with particular situations and in case of unforeseen circumstances. After an event occurred the system, based on specified location, determines nearest responsible parties, notify them and provide with the information of the emergency. As somebody is not able to take an alert the system is trying to find another authority to eliminate the incident. Scenarios may vary in accordance with seasons.

Results

The Customer received off-the-shelf emergency system both on time and within the planned custom software development cost. The system allows the Customer provide fast response and take appropriate measures in short period after an emergency occurred. During the heavy snowfall which made “red-color” situation on the Dutch railway the system successfully coped with its task and facilitated emergency elimination.

Technologies and Tools

WCF, ASP.NET, Rest, Windows Services, LINQ, SQL, AJAX, MS SQL Server 2008, Entity Framework, jQuery; CSS, HTML, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, Google Weather API, Google Map API