Siemens Mobility Switzerland launches world’s first Rail Depot Control System on AWS together with Switzerland’s iconic Matterhorn Gotthard Railway

Millions of people around the world use trains for commuting and long-distance travel and take reliable railway services for granted. To bring passengers safely to their destinations, trains need to undergo regular inspection and maintenance, which happens in rail depots.

In this blog post, we’ll describe how Siemens Mobility helped one of Switzerland’s most iconic trains, the Matterhorn Gotthard Railway (MGBahn), to build and deploy a cloud based solution for organizing the depot operation. MGBahn thereby eliminated the heavy lifting efforts required for managing the IT infrastructure on premises. We’ll first introduce rail depots, and the challenges they are facing, then we’ll give a solution overview and end with details of the technical implementation.

Introduction

At the heart of any rail depot, the shunting process is a vital operation keeping trains moving and ensures efficient rail operations. Shunting involves the movement of train coaches within the depot to organize, assemble, or disassemble trains, as well as to facilitate maintenance and prepare them for their next journey. It’s a complex process that requires a skilled team of operators and a well-defined set of procedures to ensure safety and productivity.

Matterhorn Gotthard Railway Depot in Glisergrund, Valais (VS)

Until today, complex communication processes between the dispatcher and shunting supervisor are used for the shunting procedures. In addition, employees often lack an overall operational overview, and different systems are in use for shunting and passenger train services. With the introduction of the Siemens Mobility mobile depot control system Controlguide® TrackOps Depot on AWS, these operational procedures are now made transparent, streamlined and simplified.

Solution Overview

The Glisergrund Depot of MGBahn now employs the world’s first mobile cloud-based solution for depots, Controlguide® TrackOps Depot, as Software as a Service (SaaS). This solution optimizes operational processes in MGBahn’s Glisergrund Depot, overcoming communication complexities between dispatchers and shunting foremen. TrackOps Depot on AWS streamlines operations and provides comprehensive visibility.

With this solution, the shunting foreman within the Glisergrund Depot independently manages and monitors shunting activities along designated shunting routes. He can do this independently without needing to communicate with the dispatcher in the control center. Digital requests for shunting routes, as well as the necessary points and switch settings, are adjusted by the interlocking after verification. This clear separation of routes and improved operational visibility enhances safety and process efficiency.

Fernando Lehner, MGBahn CEO, states: “We are thrilled to have implemented TrackOps Depot in close collaboration with Siemens Mobility at the Glisergrund Depot. Thanks to the mobile depot control through tablets operated by shunting engineers, our shunting operations have become more efficient, simpler, and safer.”

Controlguide® TrackOps Depot in use by MGBahn Shunting Foreman

Software as a Service

AWS regions offer the infrastructure and services needed to ensure the scalability, availability, and performance of SaaS applications on a global scale. AWS regions are distributed worldwide, allowing Siemens Mobility to deploy their SaaS application in multiple regions. This helps them reach their global customer base, ensuring low-latency access for users in different geographic locations. In this case, MGBahn requested the deployment of their systems in a location in Switzerland due to data residency and latency requirements and with the launch of the AWS Region in Switzerland, this requirement is met. According to Siemens Mobility the infrastructure costs for a scale-up or scale-out for new systems or customers are lower than with on-premises hardware.

Usability

Controlguide® TrackOps Depot integrates with the railway control and information system Controlguide® Iltis N, facilitating coordination between dispatchers in the operations control center and local shunting foremen within the depot area. The elimination of complex communication procedures between dispatchers and shunting foremen improved the autonomy of depot workers and reduced reliance on train dispatcher for over 300 autonomous operations per day. Furthermore, TrackOps Depot offers an intuitive and flexible interface, empowering shunting foremen to control the system locally using mobile tablets. The interface displays and manages shunting routes, provides occupancy information within the depot area, and presents a real-time magnified view of the operational situation.

Technical Overview

For the deployment of TrackOps Depot, Siemens Mobility uses Amazon EKS, which enables them to run Kubernetes on AWS, making it easy for their developers to use the infrastructure, tools, and processes they already know and love. Amazon EKS also makes it easy for them to run their applications at any scale by managing cluster capacity and automating node provisioning and upgrades.

To achieve high availability of their solution, Siemens Mobility deploys the application across three Availability Zones (AZs) in the AWS Region Zurich (eu-central-2), which helps them achieve the desired level of overall availability of 99,99%.

Siemens Mobility use Prometheus, Loki and Grafana, which ingests data from Amazon CloudWatch, application logs, and others to monitor the performance and health of their application. In addition, alarms are set up to notify Siemens Mobility in case of any potential issues. This allows them to detect and resolve challenges quickly, reducing the impact on their business and improving the overall user experience.

By using Amazon RDS, Siemens Mobility are enabled to set up, operate, and scale a PostgreSQL database in the cloud. It takes care of time-consuming database administration tasks, including hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. This allows them to focus on building applications and not on managing database infrastructure.

Controlguide® TrackOps Depot Architecture Deployed on AWS

Conclusion

In this blog post we showed how Siemens Mobility’s cloud-based SaaS solution, Controlguide® TrackOps Depot on AWS, improves railway operations at the Glisergrund Depot of Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn. By providing shunting foremen with mobile depot control through tablets, Siemens Mobility empowers MGBahn to optimize its operations, streamline processes, and ensure continuous innovation in the safety-critical railway environment.

The integration with AWS further strengthens the reliability and scalability of TrackOps Depot and we are delighted to see how AWS enables Siemens Mobility is leading a cloud-based digital transformation in the railway industry.

If you are interested in learning more about Siemens Mobility Controlguide® TrackOps Depot on AWS get in touch with us via the AWS contact form. Let’s work together to transform your operations and take your business to new heights.