Detecting Potential Hazardous Situations in the Dutch Railway Planning

Every day, millions of people travel by train through the Netherlands—on one of the busiest rail infrastructures in Europe. More than 10,000 train movements are performed daily. Planning for all these train rides and designing a timetable that avoids hazardous situations is a challenge. And, the challenge is constantly increasing, with more travelers every day and more trains on every new timetable.

To meet this challenge, JDriven built a space-based architecture with Apache Ignite. Ignite provides a distributed, horizontally scalable data and computational grid. The grid is used to calculate all train movements on the rail infrastructure. Thus, it becomes possible to detect potentially hazardous situations and report them to the planners, so timetable reliability can be improved. Such improvements help Nederlandse Spoorwegen (the Dutch main rail network) and ProRail to ensure that everyone travels safely to their destination.

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SPEAKER
Pim is a solution architect at JDriven and at Infuze Consulting.
Pim was contracted by NS and ProRail as architect next to Thomas Drevers on their existing planning system for adjudication of the Dutch rail infrastructure. In response to ProRail’s desire to detect potentially hazardous situations, Pim selected Ignite and designed a solution that performs billions of calculations on a data grid that can grow to 500GB.
Additionally, with a small group of architects and support from Joost van Weenen, Pim pioneered, within the client organization, digital transformation toward DevOps and innovation from bare metal JEE servers to a microservice architecture on OpenShift Platform.