CMC automates India's largest roadways
Solutions for Indian Railways' operations
CMC designs solutions for air freight movement
financials
brochures

London Underground Limited (U.K.)


C.A.R.T - Time-table scheduling and signal data generation system for
London Underground Limited (LUL)
AMC
Enablement on Terminal Emulation
Re-engineering and porting older C.A.R.T CMC application onto new technology platforms
as C.O.S
 
The Customer

The London Underground is the world's oldest and most complex subway rail network. Over 460 trains crisscross each during peak hours other over an area of 2000 sq km, carrying over 800 million passengers a year.

 
The Problem Statement

The earlier application in use at LUL was Cobol based and operated using flat files. There were around 150,000 lines of program code which had a non-structured design. The documentation was incomplete and users shared time on a mainframe system to use it. This application comprised 8 modules viz:

Schedule generation
Platforms number generation
Schedule transformation
Working timetable preparation
Photo-type setting input preparation
Signal data generation
Signal box registe
Mileage statistics
This system had an unfriendly user interface and was not flexible enough. LUL was finding this system expensive to maintain and operate. Enhancement of the same was expensive and difficult due to the non-availability of a complete set of documents. The system was also not available for 24 hrs and training was also difficult for staff.
 
CMC's Solution

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

Automated Task Management
Resource Management
Allocation function for the Scheduling Department
 

This software was part of the migration of CART from Ingres to Oracle.

WMA was deployed in May 2003 and since then has been used by the scheduling department for generating timetables. CMC was responsible for the user interface, the physical database design and the coding.

After the success of WMA, CMC embarked on the mammoth task of reverse engineering each module of CART, identifying and removing obsolete pieces of code and rewriting the technical documentation.

CMC is also responsible for designing a Data Bridge software which migrates user selected timetables from the CART system to the new COS (CART Oracle System) application.

CMC used LUL's standard software, System Architect 2000, to create the dataflow and entity relationship diagrams.

CMC is also responsible for maintaining and enhancing the CART application. The CART maintenance (LUL) raises enhancements/errors whenever there is a change in the business requirement. The team discusses all complex enhancements/errors and different solutions are put forward and the ideal solution is implemented.

The new system has transformed the entire time-table compilation process. It is much easier to operate and maintain and can be adapted to provide for the extension of existing lines and the introduction of new ones.

 
London Underground Limited software’s salient features:
Generation of trips in a timetable based line geography rules and routes stored and based on input parameters like start and end points, start or end time, route option if any on a given line
Creation of trips based on patterns is also feasible
It can support multiple lines
On any given line it can support multiple geographies at the same time which allow to build existing timetable (schedules), store previous schedules and at the same time work on future schedules
Schedules can be migrated across geographies with some constraints
Dummy crews can be assigned
Interworking can be performed between schedules of different lines i.e. trips can be imported from one schedule to another schedules based on stored rules and procedures
Platform working based on preferences, priority and other rules defined in the database can be automatically with the click of a button
Publishing of timetable
Interface to all the signaling systems of London Underground
Interface to the crew scheduling software
Ad-hoc platform closures rules can be applied on the existing schedules to generate emergency schedules
Various reports such – crew board, mileage statistics, detrainment, platform closures, depot, rolling stock, etc.
Import and export functions for schedules across different databases (like, production, testing, pre-production).
 
Platforms

Hardware:
Server SUN ES400
COS: Sun Fire 880 with 8 Processors having 16 GB RAM

Software
OS-Sun OS 5.6

Databases
C.A.R.T - Database Ingres 6.4/07,
COS - Oracle 8i

Tools
INGRES 4GL, Embedded C (ESQLC), 'C', and COBOL and the Presentation Layer is developed in INGRES Forms
C Compiler
Workshop Compilers 4.2
COBOL compiler LPI Cobol Ver 3.69
Yourdon Tool Kit
Adobe Postscript Version 1.0
Oracle Forms & Reports 6
Exceed 6.2 Terminal Emulator
System Architect 2000

Network Connectivity
An X.25 link connected the CMC to the customer’s environments through a restricted access secure link.
 
back to top

 

 
Copyright © 2010 CMC Limited, INDIA | Disclaimer | Designed and maintained by The Information Company Pvt Ltd