Russian Railways, Russian Railway (development and deployment of Express-5 system)

2015: Beginning of development of the system of "Express-5"

Vladislav Kustarev, the deputy chief of department of informatization of the Russian Railway told about development of the Express system providing sale of train tickets through the whole country, and its reengineering within import substitution program implementation at the TAdviser IT Government DAY conference in October, 2015.

As of fall of 2015 in the Russian Railway there is in operation an Express-3 system for which platform are mainframes of IBM. It provides sales with a speed up to 12 of ticket/sec. at a speed of receipt of requests for tickets about 400 requests/sec. At the same time the share of Internet sales of railway tickets exceeds 30% of the total number of implementable railway tickets in the country. In the separate directions the share of Internet sales is even higher; for example, for the Moscow-St. Petersburg direction about 70% of all implementable tickets are sold online.

Need of transition to the new Express system became an objective reality. The former version was designed 8 years ago when the settlement limit of the website made 20-30% of a total quantity of the sold tickets. Development of the Internet led to the fact that the portal of the Russian Railway works at the level of the limits today, Kustarev told.

Vladislav Kustarev, deputy chief of department of informatization of the Russian Railway

Development of the new system "Express-5" which should be brought into operation in 2016 is not limited only to liquidation of the existing problems with performance. The Russian Railway is going to increase social focus of the service and is ready to offer in a new system complex services by the uniform order. It is about sale of services on several means of transport at once and also about providing the additional services covering including suburban transportations, taxi services and so forth. Future transactions of all types of service will be carried out in the mode of "one window": through the appeal to cash desk, phone, the Internet or mobile application.

In parallel with development of services, the Russian Railway is going to refuse the platform of mainframes of IBM and to pass to architecture of x86. A new system should reduce dependence on the proprietary software also. Instead of former DBMS IBM DB2 and Oracle a new system will work based on DBMS with the open code. Terminal devices will be serviced by in-house assembly of the free distributed OS CentOS.

The pilot project of "Express-5" began in November, 2015 based on passenger company "Sakhalin".

Roman Galeyev, the head of the Center of solutions of TransIT company told about technological solutions which were applied when developing new ticket sales system to the Russian Railway of Express-5 at the TAdviser IT Government DAY conference. First of all he paid attention to scale of a solvable task. The project of technology equipment of KAS "Express-5" provided creation of the high-loaded, distributed system in which at least two main requirements should be combined effectively: very high processing speed and flexibility at setup and management.

In architecture of future system, according to Galeyev, mechanisms which will not constrain its development within, at least, next 10 years should be put.

The increase in productivity of the new system "Express-5" was one of main goals of the project. The present Express version works at a limit of the technical capabilities. At the same time the new version of a system should not only cope effectively with the current flow of transactions, but also work effectively in the conditions of the permanent accruing data stream. Premises for this purpose are the extending channels of interaction of the Express system with users, sales growth through mobile applications and the Internet.

The compromise between required flexibility and speed was found in the choice of new architecture for the Express-5 system. It is built around management of business rules. In difficult nodes of calculations configurators are created. They will carry out fast data analysis and will allow to place effectively a program code when it is required to make changes to logic of work of specific service. Developers provided in advance that it it is possible to be to perform without involvement of IT specialists.

Roman Galeyev, head of the Center of solutions TransIT

Having received in the order a new system, heads of Russian Railway business divisions, business analysts will be able independently to make changes to rules of tariffing and provision of services, available through "Express-5", approving them with colleagues, claiming and placing in a repository. The planned time which will be spent for implementation of new business rules will be calculated only several hours.

The know-how of new architecture of "Express-5" is implemented in a core of this system which was written by specialists TransIT on Java. It is very productive module capable to automatically load the updated rules and to perform them according to assigned tasks. Thanks to it, the high performance calculated by thousands of transactions per second and the flexibility of a system allowing to make quickly changes to logic of accomplishment of transactions is provided.

Application of freely extended class in-memory enterprise scale DBMS will become other innovation of the new system "Express-5". It was finished by specialists TransIT then in it there were functions providing its integrity, fault tolerance and caching. In comparison with traditional DBMS performance of a new system increased in several tens of times.

In the conclusion of the performance Roman Galeyev noted that transition to new architecture of "Express-5" allowed not only to solve assigned tasks, but also to lay the foundation for future development of the Express system in general. Development focus - "Fast data". The convenience and performance of "smart" customer interaction will be reached due to use of a new configurator of rules and a storage system of in-memory. It will allow to analyze quickly taking place events and to provide effective solutions for acceptance.

The new architecture will allow to refuse the calculation of "hundreds of thousands of services" on a request of the client lying in a repository. A system will intellectually select services, relevant to the interests of the one who sent a request, being based on earlier collected data on its interaction with a system.

Contractor Selection

As a result of the competition held by the Russian Railway in May-June, 2015, the system developer of "Express-5" selected the TransIT company which became the only procurement participant.^[1]

Notes