Practical in Practice- the new Pre-& Post- Run activities make SOB’s everyday’s work easier
Pre- & Post- Run activities are inseparably linked to a train run and so they were integrated in the model since RailOpt’s initial concept. Nevertheless, the possibility for flexible planning of these activities in while considering all involved resources is still a feature unique to Qnamic’s planning & dispatching solution. With the release of RailOpt 6.9, we took this functionality a step further: with a redesigned interface and enhanced data structures, we were able to improve the user-friendliness, improve the potential for optimization & automatization and significantly reduce the potential for human error.
These new Pre- & Post- Run activies have now gone into production for the long- standing RailOpt users of the Schweizerische Südostbahn AG (SOB) and other organizations. The planners & dispatchers have now provided the initial verdict: Urs Oberholzer, head of Service & Quality in transport with SOB, emphasizes that SOB’s planners are very pleased with the new enhancement. Especially for train drivers, the even more detailed service plan was a substantial improvement: A concise table shows the process of the Pre- & Post- Rund activities in exact details. It presents the tasks at hand even more granularly and with even greater clarity than the previous implementation.
The enhancement simplifies adding or removing individual steps of the process. The dispatcher has the opportunity to adapt the process to the given situation quickly and directly at any time. All changes are adopted in the gantt- chart immediately and mobile solution immediately, making the communication between the personell more transparent. For Urs Oberholzer this means specifically that reliability has improved further and human mistakes are prevented.
Because the planning of Pre- & Post- Run activities is a very complex task on the one hand, but a common one on the other hand, we improved the function for creating templates significantly. The new data model offers completely new options for automation of tasks that previously had to be planned manually, Oberholzer says. This statement corresponds with our testing results: Testers created complex process structures three times faster, with a lower error rate compared to the previous implementation.
With release 6.9 now in production: Practice confirms what the tests promised and what our team hoped for while planning the new Pre- & Post- Run activities: the functionality reduces complexity, frees up resources and supports train drivers and dispatchers. All in all, the enhancement improves reliability and therefore the safety and robustness of rail traffic.
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