Massive Growth in Chinese freight needs a grid solution

by Yan Zhang, Alexander Wohrer and Peter Brezany, University of Vienna

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By 2010, China aims to move 280,00 freight cars on its railways each day. With each car carrying 60 tons of freight, that’s a lot of goods to move and a vast amount of data to process. The Grid has shown much promise as a technology to deal with this level of data and, after many successes in academia, focus is shifting to the use of the grid in industry. A group in Vienna is working to make this shift a reality by using the grid to enable China’s railway freight system to cope with its unprecedented growth.

Information about transported goods is described in a waybill. In China, the Ministry of Railway is responsible for collecting waybill data from railway stations and depots via a private network, and storing it in a centralised database. This centralised solution does not scale as the level of collected data grows. A better solution is needed and Yan Zhang, a Chinese PhD student currently working at the University of Vienna, aims to provide it.

After studying the available grid technologies, Yan Zhang chose to use OMII-UK’s OGSA-DAI software and OGSA-DQP to build the data integration and analysis services that were needed. This combined approach would provide an extensible, Web-Service-based architecture that could be developed for all freight-information applications. The new system would hide the details of the data sources and analysis services from the user, making the system easy to use. It would also balance the use of computational resources.

China Railway’s new grid will share computational and data resources distributed between the ministry of railway and the eighteen railway administrations over which it presides, and provide support for collaborative and interactive problem solving. The proposed grid infrastructure will enable more efficient use of available resources, and will help produce applications that are specifically designed to solve the problems faced by railway systems. Ultimately, this will result in the provision of much better services for employees of the railway department and customers too.

Integrating and analysing such a large amount of data poses a challenge for the infrastructure components, so it is expected that the future of China Railway’s grid will rely on novel analysis services and automatic generation of workflows for short-term decision making. The provision of OGSA-DAI and OGSA-DQP, together with the expertise available in Vienna, will lead to a Grid-based solution that will improve the timetabling and scheduling of Chinese freight trains.

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