CMC was awarded a contract by London Underground in 1989, to migrate the system and to design and develop a database for its timetabling/operation plan generation software. This required redesigning the complete application and redevelopment on a then state of art workstation environment. It also required the selection of a suitable DBMS. The customer needed a friendly user interface, removal of redundancies in the system and a long term system support.
CMC leveraged its onsite-offshore model and support from CMC’s internal consultants and CMC R&D’s offshore technology centres, to help the customer effect cost savings in this development effort. The 11-member core project team was carefully selected so the team pool had the requisite skills on project management, Unix, Ingres and the IBM MVS environment. The team was familiarised with the LUL operations through videos.
The team interpreted the existing source code handed over by the customer, drew up the details of the existing functionality and collated the new emerging business needs of the customer and the expected enhancements in a short time frame. A decision was taken to implement the new system with the Ingres Relational DBMS using the SSADM methodology and through the use of CMC’s rugged internal programming standards. Analysis, design and program documentation was done using the Yourdan Toolkit. Extensive testing was carried out and around 120 person months of work was carried out from the offshore development centre in India. The CMC team ensured periodic project review and monitoring on milestones. Design and development reviews were held in India by LUL.
CMC successfully delivered and commissioned the CART (Computer Aided Railway Timetabling) system in 1990.
The London Underground System is a constantly evolving system. Its needs vary from time to time and these needs are often met by making changes in the train schedules. CART is responsible for the generation of these schedules and schedule information for various signaling systems used in the Underground System.
CART consists of over 20 modules, many of which are solely for the purpose of generating schedule data for the various signaling systems and MIS software. It also produces a printed version of timetable for internal department use. The Business Logic is developed using INGRES 4GL, Embedded C (ESQLC), 'C', and COBOL and the Presentation Layer is developed in INGRES Forms.
Subsequently the maintenance contract was also awarded to CMC and since then, CMC has been giving onsite support to LUL, making necessary changes to the system as and when required by the changing business needs. CMC followed a structured change control procedure to effect any changes / enhancements proposed by the Schedules Team of LUL.
In 1998, CART was made available to the scheduling department on their Windows PC using Hummingbird's Exceed emulator. CMC enabled this process. The installation and setting of the Exceed software was done by the onsite team in London. This arrangement made available the usual windows application like MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint to CART users. Previously, users had to go to different PCs to do any other work.
The CART software too, was migrated to a more powerful SUN machine. The migration to the new hardware platform was done offshore in Hyderabad.
In 2002, LUL took a decision to re-engineer CART and use Oracle as the database. LUL asked CMC to provide various solutions for implementing the new system.
CMC recommended using Developer 6i with Oracle and also provided training on Oracle to LUL key staff.
As proof of the concept project, CMC developed a highly customised Workflow Management Application (WMA) using Developer 6i and Oracle 8i for the scheduling department. WMA provides
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