Advanced Device for Wayside Train Control

Highlights

Having launched a new device for wayside interlocking equipment monitoring, our client, a globally-known railway operation provider, expected its enhanced monitoring and communication capabilities. However, suffering from performance issues and insufficient functionality, the product required upgrades to effectively perform PTC and non-PTC functions. Deadlines were critical for the client to utilize the upgraded device within the new signaling project that was about to start.

Challenge

Client Challenge

Extend the use of the advanced wayside controller after addressing critical issues and customizing control.

Project Objective

Accelerate performance and enrich functionality for the advanced wayside controller, with a lack of field equipment and product documentation under extreme deadlines.

Solution

To meet the strictest client deadlines, we initially built the optimized process for this project, considering interconnections between the tasks provided. To follow the custom process, the PSA team provided advanced change tracking and coherent updates for the duplicated project parts.

First, we took up extensive bug fixing including functional and visual bugs, as well as logical and security defects for both hardware and control apps. With no documentation describing business logic, we studied the code and provided reverse engineering to recover all the system functions.

To succeed with defect resolution, the PSA team:

Reproduced all the real-world defects by simulating data of the absent equipment in a laboratory. Highly specific applications determining the system behavior were created to simulate its certain states.
Created and confirmed hypotheses for unconventional issues that couldn’t be simulated, such as data loss when power off. Extensive testing and memory state analysis were performed.
Set about additional tasks on the eve of the release, which appeared due to initial oversights on the client side. New bugs were fixed in parallel with the general flow to avoid disrupting the process.

Our engineering team has optimized source code to improve the overall performance, thus speeding up some operations, such as installing the interlocking application and applying settings.

PSA adjusted web control app functionality to support the equipment updates allowing for changing the range of valid values and default values, changing/adding checks for entering parameters, and adding new and deleting unused board parameters. We incorporated editable tables to operate with data of various formats. This complex component required operations with CSV files and comprehensive testing.

Thus, the new visual components and pages to manage new functionality were created, the web page layout was updated, and coherent interactions between the frontend and backend were provided.

To simplify and accelerate the interlocking application creation and therefore the wayside management process, PSA created a management tool with sub-tools capable of the following:

Compile the application logic file to be processed by the target equipment
Simplify modification of the compiled applications
Compare application files and create reports

To accelerate the approval, our engineer stepped in and performed a code review, and was available according to their time zone.

Thus, our client gained the updated advanced product to coordinate wayside operations at top efficiency. For the comprehensive assessment, we included extra functionality for the test version of the system.

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