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Case Study – ARTC ATMS

Agonics experts deliver critical digital datasets to power new Advanced Train Management System (ATMS)

CLIENT

ARTC

LOCATION

Adelaide, Australia

Challenge

The Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) manages and maintains the interstate freight network across 5 Australian states.

The Advanced Train Management System (ATMS) project is a digital train management solution with real-time monitoring of trains with GPS and mobile technology, making trains ‘smart’. ATMS is a key engineering initiative at ARTC, providing both safer train operations and increased capacity across the 9,000 km long network.

Built using technology supplied by Lockheed Martin, the ATMS system relies on digital datasets that describe the network infrastructure. ARTC was keen to understand how to automate the translation of existing ARTC digital datasets into the Lockheed Martin ATMS format in order to support ATMS system rollout.

Having performed a comprehensive whole of network imagery and LiDAR survey across 9,000 km of ARTC track, Agonics had already delivered highly accurate digital track centreline datasets that describe the alignment of the network.

As a leading expert in workflows that automate the translation of railway survey datasets into other digital formats, Agonics was selected by ARTC to partner on the ATMS project on the inaugural Port Augusta to Whyalla and Tarcoola to Cook sections.

Solution

To commence the project, the Agonics and ARTC project teams met in Adelaide to discussed detailed requirements and timeframes. As the whole of network had already been mapped by Agonics railway mapping experts and the datasets delivered had been validated by ARTC engineers, and no additional field data acquisition was required for the ATMS project.

Initial activities were centred around the design of a quality assured workflow that considered all data inputs, data translation, quality control checks, the necessary Feature Manipulation Engine (FME) workbenches, and data outputs based on the Lockheed Martin Database Schema for ATMS.

Due to the criticality of the ATMS project Agonics undertook additional enhanced quality assurance steps at each stage of the project including extensive testing and validation of FME workbench designs, full traceability of requirements and versioning of workbenches.

A key quality verification step saw a test subset of data be delivered to ARTC to be then trialed by Lockheed Martin engineers in the USA prior to full database production.

Once the test subset data has been validated, the Agonics team proceeded to deliver the full datasets required for the Port Augusta to Whyalla and Tarcoola to Cook sections.

Outcome

  • FME workbenches were used to successfully deliver digital data in the prescribed Lockheed Martin format
  • The inaugural ATMS sections could be commissioned as planned
  • ARTC was able to reuse digital datasets already acquired during a whole of network mapping project to meet the requirement of the ATMS project.