TRACK/RAILS: An application and content management framework for railway operators

Advances made in wireless connectivity (3G, 4G, WiFi, etc.) opened up a whole range of innovations with regards to applications and services deployed in the railway domain. Examples include providing best effort passenger internet access and periodic communication of diagnostic information from train to railway stations and railway control centres. In later stages, new ideas emerged that fully embrace the potential of wireless communication. This paper focuses on detailing a solution to the remote management of content and applications running on a railway fleet. Installation and maintenance of these applications currently requires manual (i.e. on-site/on-train) interventions, which are both costly, as trains need to be taken out of circulation, and error-prone due to the inherent heterogeneity of railway fleet configurations. The distributed framework proposed in this paper allows the complete life cycle of these on-board applications / services to be managed remotely from the wayside, taking into account the unreliable communication channels between wayside and railway fleet.