Infrabel

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Making sure the trains run on time and are safe and secure is an enormous challenge for any railway network. To better achieve these goals, the former Belgian National Society for Railways (SNCB/NMBS) was restructured on January 1, 2005 into three organizations: SNCB/NMBS is responsible for the transportation of passengers and goods; SNCB/NMBS-Holding manages operations including human resources, ICT and group strategy; and Infrabel is responsible for the management, maintenance, renewal and development of the Belgian railway infrastructure. Infrabel is also responsible for train paths allocation to all Belgian and foreign operators and guarantees equal access to the railway network for any operator with the required security certification. Before the inauguration of the new Traffic Control center, it operated four regional traffic control centers and a national monitoring center in Brussels to maintain safety and efficiency across the network. Following the restructure at the beginning of 2005, Infrabel immediately looked at ways of improving this operation.

The first critical decision was to centralize traffic monitoring operations at a new communications center. This also offered the opportunity to review its information technology infrastructure from the ground up. The first step was to develop an application to monitor traffic on the network. Called A172, this solution was developed in-house to run from a datacenter that comprises Sun Fire V890 servers running the Solaris 8 Operating System and Sybase database software. For disaster recovery purposes, the team set up a separate datacenter at another location running near-identical server architecture. In addition to providing secure back up, the two centers offer full-load balancing at times of high demand.

When it came to selecting the client hardware to run in the control room itself, the Infrabel team had a number of criteria in mind. Most importantly, they wanted as much information to be available to teams of controllers as possible. Frédéric Tais, IT project leader at SNCB Holding, envisioned a system in which each desk had six display screens or even more. "We spoke to a number of suppliers and visited several organizations that operated similar styles of a control center, including transport and logistics businesses, and banks."

All of these locations faced the same challenge: If every screen displays different but complementary information, it must be driven by a separate client device. "We considered all the options," says Tais. "A standard PC is out of the question. You have to imagine two, three, or more devices under your desk, each one consuming a lot of power and generating heat. Not to mention the noise of the drives, cooling fans, and other moving parts."

When the ICT team spoke to Sun, it became clear that Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display clients were the ideal solution. "The devices have a very small footprint, meaning we can store them securely within the desks themselves. They also consume far less power than a PC and generate much less heat," Tais says. "Critically they make no noise at all. That’s essential for employees who must be able to concentrate fully on the information displayed on the screens." The communications center will eventually host 200 Sun Ray 2 clients, connected to Sun Ray servers by a local Ethernet connection. Each client is connected to a screen that displays information that gives a controller a complete picture of the position of the trains at a given point in time and other useful information concerning the railway traffic.

The wisdom of Infrabel's technology strategy is apparent when you see the control room, which brings to mind a futuristic air-traffic control center. Teams of employees are organized around islands of desks, which can have a setup of six or more flat screens all mounted carefully in the line of vision of each group. And while the display technology is in full view, the corresponding Sun Ray 2 clients are tucked away neatly in the desk mounting itself. From a controller's perspective this arrangement of client devices and display screens makes perfect sense. In an uncluttered, quiet environment, the controller gets clear, uninterrupted views of the status of the entire Belgian network.

The service is also extremely versatile. In addition to the custom-made A172 software, Infrabel has built a parallel intranet called ArtWeb. The position of trains is available to a much wider audience who use this data to communicate with their colleagues and passengers. For example, using ArtWeb you can call up the schedule of a particular train and see whether it is running on time, or it's ahead or behind schedule.

Since the Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients were deployed at the end of 2006, the Infrabel team has been able to measure the impact on the new operation. Cost savings have been achieved by consolidating technology and the wider infrastructure in one location. This has also contributed to the overall efficiency of Infrabel by simplifying communications and reducing the dependency on disparate technologies managed by many suppliers. The technology is also extremely reliable. "Because The Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients have no moving parts, we simply don't have the reliability issues associated with more complex client technology, including PCs. In addition, the devices are extremely efficient, consuming only four watts, about five percent of a typical PC," says Tais.

As for the future, Tais is confident Infrabel has developed a unique solution that shows the way forward for the wider European railway network. In recognition of its achievement, Infrabel has been awarded ICT Innovator of the Year 2007, organized by DataNews and Trends Business ICT magazines.