Meridian Awards 2012

GSM-R is a new standard for wireless rail telecommunications which is endorsed by the International Union of Railways (UIC). This offers railway specific functionality designed to improve the reliability, safety and quality of railway operations. GSM-R is a communication system for traffic control and other communication within the Rail Network. This serves engine drivers, maintenance crews and other personnel working on railway network, both on the track or at stations.

PBBl's 'Area Manager' is the first and only solution available on the market for managing GSM-R services geographically. It has been developed based on the requirements of the Swiss Federal Railways SBB and enables network planners at railway organisations to define and set up important GSM-R services in a very easy and efficient way. The AreaManager is a geographical railway services management solution that allows displaying and configuring all necessary network parameters within a dynamic interactive mapping application.

Train controllers are only responsible for a specific rail track section within a defined geographical area covered by a limited number of network cells.

Therefore network planners have a strong requirement for location intelligence in order to understand complex network situations. A central map view helps planners to discover the geographical relationship between train locations, dispatcher responsibilities and network coverage. This visual control allows meaningful configuration of location dependent GSM-R services through the network cells displayed on a map. The ability to set up GSM-R services through PBBl's single and easy to use geographical application interface results in huge savings in time, resources and costs. Additionally the visual representation guarantees a much better quality assurance in the entire planning process. Railway organisations can now minimize the risk of misconfiguration, e.g. calls which are relevant only for railway employees in the Bern area shouldn't be routed to employees who are located within a network cell somewhere in Zurich. This is especially important for emergency group calls.

Depending on the complexity of a GSM-R network the total number of cell groups to be managed can easily grow up to several thousand. Compared to the classical ways of just using alphanumerical lists without any geographical linkage, Pitney Bowes Software helps railway organisations now not only to save a huge percentage of their time, but also to increase the level of quality in their networking planning process.

Benefit:

• A central map view helps planners to discover the geographical relationship between train locations, dispatcher responsibilities and network coverage.
• This visual control allows meaningful configuration of location-dependent GSM-R services through the network cells displayed on a map.
• The ability to set up GSM-R services through PBBl's single and easy-to-use geographical application interface results in huge savings in time, resources and costs.

Implementation:

• Rich client Graphical User Interface (GUI).
• The client component can be run as a Java WebStart application or as an applet in a conventional web browser
• Deployment, version management and execution of the client with a single click.
• The software does not have to be installed on the client PCs. -Enterprise-level MapXtreme Java client-server application based on an MVC2 architecture.