About the Customers
UK’s one of the biggest Rail owns, operates and develops most of Great Britain’s railway network and infrastructure. It maintains 20,000+ miles of railway track, 30,000+ bridges, tunnels, viaducts and thousands of signals, level crossings and stations. NW also manages 20 of the UK’s largest railway stations, while the others (2,500+) are managed by the country’s other train operating companies.
Situation
As part of their digital transformation process, the rail enterprise decided to upgrade their data management and data processing capabilities. Client wanted to adopt the new International Industry Standard data formats and move away from their legacy data file formats. With this upgrade to new systems, the old format of their Train Path requests named ‘PEX’ (similar to the .CSV format), must be converted to the International Standard TAFTAP format (XML format). This new XML format data must be stored and made available in Data Warehouse DB.
Action
Atkins & AdfarTech collaborated on the project. The first challenge we overcame was to understand the older data processing, and then clearly draft the project requirements and business cases. Subsequently, the solution was developed using the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform in its centre for System Integration; Azure Cosmos DB for data lookups, audit and logging; Azure Synapse for persisting both XML & JSON data and for Analytics. The solution was successfully deployed and the customer is now able to easily use the newly formatted data. This data is now being used to generate all the required operational reports and analytics around the train movement.
Technology Used:
The integrated toolset that enabled this:
- Business Processing Implementation – MuleSoft AnyPoint Platform
- Visual representation of mappings – Microsoft Visio
- Master/Reference Data – Azure Cosmos DB
- Data Warehouse DB – Azure Synapse
- File Storage – Azure Storage Account
- CI/CD – Azure Repository
Result:
Key benefits achieved by Network Rail:
- Automation of the conversion of conventional Train Path Request files format from PEX, to industry standard XML formats, hence delivering efficiency and saving a lot of time.
- The data is classified/segregated and stored appropriately, so that it is easy for users to consume the data easily as and when required.