Improving resource utilization in the Swiss rail network with software to augment hardware solutions to growth.

 

The Swiss Federal Railway Network

Switzerland has the densest rail network in the world. Statistically speaking, more than 90 trains travel over every meter of track daily - in Germany, for example, it is only half as much. In detail, around 285 million passengers (about 38 times the country's population) and 60 million tonnes of freight travel along more than 3000 kilometers of track connecting 824 stations. Even so, the Swiss Federal Railway (SBB) manages to operate 96.2% of all trains with less than 5 minutes of delay. And demand is increasing - 6% last year in passenger traffic alone. Currently planned hardware expansion, with new routes and double capacity trains, is not likely to be ready until 2014. This situation motivated the desire to better exploit existing infrastructure using more ambitious software, hence the Network-wide Track Management System (NeTS).

 

The Network-wide Track Management System

The hundreds of planners in various SBB offices, who are responsible for developing passenger and freight timetables, work with a variety of different planning systems on the basis of the company's 125 years of experience. Although SBB has been using software to aid this task for many years, previous systems are reaching their technical limits. The NeTS project integrates the capabilities of three of these systems for route, station, and maintenance planning. Additionally, it provides higher data resolution and national scope. NeTS' sophisticated interactional support, based on the standard elements of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, makes planning considerably easier. NeTS has been developed by a team of over 60 people in a 4-way partnership led by the Swiss Federal Railway and Netcetera. Production of the nation-wide 2010 timetable using NeTS began operation in July 2008.

 

Solution Walk-through

To gain a general understanding of the issues involved, please watch the short movie depicting Fred and Lisa's everyday life example of train planning. It may also be helpful to see how the system was explained to the general Swiss public in the translated newspaper article, "High Resolution Timetable", from the SonntagsZeitung. To get a more detailed glimpse into Fred's planning activities, please watch the short application demo for creating a yearly train schedule for a particular route. Since this demo exhibits only selected application features, there is also a 1 page feature overview fact sheet, which is shown in a detailed feature summary slide presentation (German-only).