Delivering rail and reservation information services to nationwide Train Operating Companies (TOCs) in UK
Overview.
The Rail Delivery Group (RDG), previously the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), is the British rail industry membership body that brings together passenger and freight rail companies, Network Rail and High Speed 2. The company was set up by the train operators to ensure nationwide services – such as ticket acceptance and rail cards – continued after the privatization of the railways under the Railways Act 1993.
Rail Availability & Reservation Service (RARS), a major IT initiative program which had been envisioned to phase out existing legacy IT services in a gradual manner and provide SaaS based IT services to the nationwide Train Operating Companies (TOCs) with modern IT platform and infrastructure to support and provide better quality of service (QoS) to the end customers.
The program was planned and executed in phase-wise manner.
Phase 1 of RARS2 was focused on the delivery of a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) replacement of NRS and a migration of all TOCs onto the RARS2 Platform through the utilisation of the RDG RARS Broker.
Phase 2 focuses on the delivery of new functionality and improved information feeds through the RARS platform. A new reservation interface, live service and operating model were being included as workstreams of the delivery
A complex IT program such as RDG' s RARS can't go unnoticed without challenges during its design and delivery life cycles. Some of the key concerns or challenges worth mentioned here
Around 59 REST API based microservices with medium to high complexity were designed, developed and delivered as RARS broker. The Quality of Services(QoS) were critical concerns to achieve such as 250 TPS, 1sec response time considering applying complex business rules and transformation
Interoperability of services newly designed and developed with existing legacy services while maintaining data quality and integrity
The enterprise level domain model design for rail and reservation which should be streamlined for future business focus and also supports legacy data model for achieving interoperability with existing legacy system(s)
Integration with 3rd party services to perform CRUD (create, Read, Update and Delete) on rail and reservations data keeping integration as fault tolerant and highly responsive. The integration also design and developed to handle partial success of API data transactions.
Solution.
The integrated toolset that enabled this:
Business Processing Implementation - MuleSoft Anypoint Platform which provides RESTful API services with applied oath security framework and policies
Visual representation of mappings and UML design - Microsoft Visio, DrawIO
Master/Reference Data - AWS S3 bucket
Security framework - AWS IAM and JWT policy framework in Anypoint platform
CI/CD - Gitlab Repository, CI/CD script Jobs for build and deployment
The Impact.
Results Achieved: Key benefits achieved by RDG
Provides modern IT services and infrastructure as a cloud based platform services to the nationwide available Train Operating Companies (TOCs) to manage and provide better services to the end customers
Since the services provided are cloud based, provisioning and meeting any surge in demand can be well managed and mitigated in advance
Decommission of existing legacy systems and services can be done with ease due to presence of interoperable services which reduces any business impact as a result
Quantitative Metrics: Include all the relevant quantitative metrics that demonstrate the impact (e.g., percentage improvements, time saved).
