Jini technology applied to railway systems

In the world of pervasive computing where large management systems, as well as small devices, all become interconnected, the problem of the configuration and management of networks is becoming increasingly complex. System administrators have to deal with many problems due to the increasingly distributed architecture of systems. Jini, a new paradigm for the development and management of distributed systems, provides mechanisms that enable systems to plug together to form an impromptu community. This practice report demonstrates how Jini can be applied in an industrial environment, or more exactly how it can be used in the integration of embedded devices on-board trains in the back-office IT infrastructure of railway operators. We present two use cases: the first is about an on-board service that allows for remote access to an on-board diagnosis database; the second is about automatically installing new services on-board trains. The results are encouraging and prove that Jini is the appropriate technology to link application servers and service gateways in embedded servers.