Component based system architecture for railway capacity management systems

Abstract

The European Community pursues the 'liberalization' of European railway traffic. One of the key issues of this plan is the separation of railway infrastructure management and transportation service operation. But this also means that the 'traditional' national railway companies have to be divided, leaving one unit managing the infrastructure and other units operating transport services. The current IT applications for infrastructure capacity management are still focused on centralized structures and track capacity marketing processes. The environmental conditions for infrastructure managers require and extended track capacity marketing approaches, e.g. the implementation of open Web services, public interfaces to infrastructure management applications etc. This work introduces aspects of present IT applications and processes for capacity management and presents an integrating component based system architecture with open Web services and migration approaches for existing IT applications. The aim of This work is to outline a way to migrate current IT systems to integrated component systems with consistent and redundant free data and with transparent and durable public functionalities.