Transportation
ZettaScale’s DDS solution provides high-performance real-time data connectivity for ProRail’s essential railway management systems.
ProRail is the railway management organisation responsible for operating and maintaining the Dutch railway network. It is responsible for the maintenance, renewal, expansion and safety of more than 7,000 kilometres of track. ProRail is also in charge of regulating all train traffic (160 million kilometres per year), in addition to building and managing railway stations.
The Challenge
With more than 6,000 trains and 1.2 million passengers travelling on the Netherlands’ railways on a daily basis, the transportation system is one of the busiest in Europe. That’s why ProRail uses the ASTRIS system. Within ASTRIS, the traffic control and security systems are linked, and the railway management technology is designed to control and monitor the infrastructure uniformly.
Their main challenge was concerning data connectivity. ProRail needed a high-performance solution that would work for their network traffic control and security systems—one that could transform an ageing railway with superior communication technology.
The Solution
ZettaScale’s DDS provides ProRail’s ATRIS system with real-time data connectivity. Our OMG DDS implementation was developed from 20-plus years of experience to deliver a reliable, real-time and fault-tolerant data-sharing platform. Because our solution offers a streamlined system architecture, it enables the transportation system’s applications to focus exclusively on the most urgent data and mission-critical information.
This is a deviation from typical DDS implementations where connections between outside applications are created to send messages back and forth between the systems, slowing things down. Instead, Zetta DDS can be deployed in different locations without any changes in the application code, making it easy to reuse existing components and efficiently integrate them into different systems. The result is a simplified architecture that costs less to develop, integrate and maintain.
Within the ATRIS environment, ZettaScale’s DDS offers peer-to-peer communication without brokers or servers to empower seamless data sharing across sensors, components, applications and systems. ProRail benefits from a communication technology that boasts latencies as low as 30 µsec, a throughput of millions of msgs/sec and a solution that can scale across millions of participants.
If any problems arise in one area of the system, ATRIS will continue to function successfully due to ZettaScale’s DDS implementation. This is non-negotiable for a system that cannot fail without bringing the entire railway system to a screeching halt. Ultimately, ProRail needed the Zetta Platform’s solution to enable real time data sharing at the right time in the right place.
Henk Bothof, CIO at ProRail, said, “(Zetta DDS) provides the real-time functionality and mission-critical performance we need. It also delivers that important capability to maintain non-volatile information for late-joiners in a fault-tolerant way.”
The Zetta Platform prides itself on bringing several strategic advantages to our partners from the transportation industry, such as:
- Decreased time to market
- Fault Tolerant – Zetta DDS provided no single point of failure
- Guaranteed mission critical reliability and deterministic behaviour
- Reduced cost of platform maintenance
- Provided an architecture that is scalable over thousands or even millions of end-points
- Greatly reduced the time and cost of developing connected systems
Our company’s mission is to bring every connected human and device the unconstrained freedom to communicate, compute and store — anywhere, at any scale, efficiently and securely!
Get in Touch
To learn more about what our technology can do for you, visit our Zetta Platform page or get in touch with our team today.