The backbone of the transportation communication systems
A transportation communication network systems integrator ties all the different subsystems together. There are various systems that the transportation system depends upon, such as radio communications, passenger information systems, and train signaling. All of these need to have some interaction amongst themselves to operate properly together. Since all these systems are dependent on the core network, it creates a lot of requirements that need to be considered in the design and implementation.
Designing transportation communications infrastructure
A transportation communications system is much more complicated than your typical network design. You have multiple levels of redundancy, as well as high availability and resiliency concerns which must be considered. Before designing a communications network, you need to have an end-to-end view of all the network applications that are used in the communication systems. This will enable you to design safety and quality of service from the beginning of the project as opposed to at the end or as an afterthought. These safety and mission critical networks have a lot of oversight that require extra review and testing.
Syncing the operational center and backup
The core network in a high-speed or light rail environment would be an operation and control center which would have a backup operational control center. The operation and control center communicates and exchanges information constantly with the backup center, so both are always in sync with each other. If there is a catastrophic failure with an operational center or an isolated event for the center, then the backup control center can take over command and keep the system running smoothly and without impact to the services.
Safety and mission critical networks
Once the operations center and backup are synced, the passengers can make use of the networks reliably and safely. The communications backbone delivers all this traffic to central operational control centers so that the information can be exchanged and adapted depending on which system is taking information from others to create intercommunication. These are safety critical, mission critical networks, which means the design standard is much higher. Fujitsu brings our 20 plus years of experience into this domain to ensure that the safety requirements are considered from the start and brought to bear in the design.
Building the design around safety
Multiple levels of redundancy, availability, resiliency, and various safety concerns affect the design choices that we make. These are going to be big concerns for transportation communication systems. We want to have seamless failure recovery, which affects all our design choices at the very beginning. We also stay aware of the different flows in the system that have requirements for connectivity. Being aware of their requirements and building those into the design upfront is critical to ensuring the safety of passengers. We build in the safety and quality of service from the beginning and not at the end as an afterthought since it’s central to the design project.
Learn more about Fujitsu’s expertise in transportation network systems integration and design.