RailNetEurope (MicroStrategy BI)

Project Objective

Before creation of the integration platform there was no method to provide to the national transport agencies the single centralized managed program interface for access to Pathfinder. A project objective is development of the integration platform allowing:

• Ask information exchange between Pathfinder and the national systems:

1) Provide easier connection of the national systems to Pathfinder. As the national systems can make requests for development of a route in the own format different from the internal Pathfinder format, it is necessary to provide a possibility of creation and setup of conversions of formats

2) Provide a possibility of joint work over the schedule of the different national agencies

3) Provide a possibility of the notification of the national agencies on new requests in Pathfinder and about change of the existing schedules

4) Provide a possibility of further development of Pathfinder regarding TAF/TAP-TSI fulfillment of requirements (Telematic Applications for Freight – Technical Specification for Interoperability) and also possibilities of cost determination of a route

5) Execute additional checks of security and integrity of data

• Increase system value for end users:

1) Users should have an opportunity to focus on tasks of the business, without being distracted by the repeating tasks, noncritical for business

2) Users of a system should have an opportunity to use own means for access to Pathfinder, without entering at the same time twice same information

3) Pathfinder should be used more fully in the course of approval of schedules and change of their statuses

4) The integration platform should provide an opportunity for the participating organizations to monitor any change in a status of their request, providing for this purpose a user-friendly interface and sending automatic notifications

5) Instead of the existing, not standardized adapters to Pathfinder, it is necessary to develop new on the basis of the industrial platform

• Provide scalability of a system:

1) The number of users of a system increases, and in the medium term growth of amount of requests through Pathfinder is expected

2) Providing new services will allow to be connected to a system to the cargo transportation companies

3) Now a system services 80% of passenger traffic of member countries of RNE and 5% of cargo. In the short term it is going to bring these indicators to 100 and 50-80% respectively.

In addition to the listed purposes, the integration platform should provide the interface for business process management allowing quicker and more effectively than in classical programming, to model the changing business processes.

Solution

Specialists S&T Russia developed the integration solution on the IBM WebSphere platform. During the project the following works were performed:

1. Installation and setup of the system software

• IBM HTTP Server
• IBM WebSphere Process Server V6.1
• IBM WebSphere Business Monitor V6.1.1
• IBM WebSphere Business Modeler V6.1

2. Development of integration services for IBM WebSphere Process Server

• Services of joint work over schedules
• Services of the notification about new requests and the user interface of the administrator to them

3. Development of services of monitoring for IBM WebSphere Business Monitor

• Development of model of the monitor
• Development of dashboards for users and system administrators
• Development of the supportive applications of the administrator simplifying creation and configuring of the customized dashboards for users

4. Documentation and training

• Creation of the step-by-step instruction describing system deployment, setup of all its components
• Carrying out additional training in Business Modeler V6.1, IBM WebSphere Process Server, IBM WebSphere Integration Developer, IBM WebSphere Business Monitor, IBM WebSphere Business Monitor Toolkit

From the technical point of view the solution developed by specialists S&T Russia provides to users of a system a number of Web services using which it is possible to execute authentication in a system, to create a new request, to request or change existing. At the same time the main functionality connected with coordination of process on development of a route remained in Pathfinder.

The created integration solution implements two options of use. In the first case, the railway enterprise which wants to request a route creates the corresponding requests and sends them to the integration platform which displays this request in calls of Pathfinder services. At the same time the integration platform provides additional access control to data. In the second, the integration platform periodically checks whether new requests at users of a system appeared and if appeared, it transfers them in Pathfinder.

Results

Thanks to professionalism of the Russian team S&Т, project objectives were achieved. The integration solution implementing a reference lifecycle model of BPM and also allowing to perform a continual and closed loop of business process management from modeling before monitoring is constructed. During the project it was shown that use of development tools of IBM (IBM WebSphere Integration Developer, IBM WebSphere Business Monitor Toolkit) allows to create easily and quickly difficult software solutions.