Digital India: Cisco aims to propel Digital Revolution in Indian Railways with 15 New Products

Digital India: Cisco aims to propel Digital Revolution in Indian Railways with 15 New Products

New Delhi:  Cisco – a Information Technology giant has launched its Internet of Things (IOT) system based on six technology pillars which, when combined together, should help to reduce the complexity of digitalisation for the railway industry.

Within the six pillars, Cisco has also launched 15 new products. These include the IW3702 wireless access point to connect mass transit systems and city WiFi networks, the IR 909 and IR 908 series industrial routers with WiFi and 4G/LTE connectivity, the Mobile IP Gateway for connected rail solutions, and a range of cameras with 360o view for situation awareness and audio and digital sensors.

Cisco estimates that 50 billion devices and objects will be connected to the internet by 2020, even though today more than 99% of objects in the physical world remain unconnected. Digitalisation is complex, and devices and objects are being connected and unrelated networks converged at an increasingly rapid pace. Cisco says that the benefits of these connections can only be realised through the application of advanced data analytics, which often requires the creation of intelligent applications capable of accelerating new business models or increasing productivity.Cisco’s new system is designed to address these challenges. 

The six pillars comprise:

network connectivity including purpose-built routing, switching, and wireless products

fog computing to enable data to be analyzed and manage locally security to unify cyber and physical security ,data analytics management and automation, and an application enablement platform offering a set of APIs to enable users to design, develop and deploy their own applications based on internet of things capabilities.

Cisco Connected Rail solutions help achieve a wide range of Safety, Mobility, and Efficiency objectives:

Keep passengers and employees safe

Provide onboard passenger Wi-Fi, entertainment, live scheduling, high-speed voice and video, and more

Converge multiple networks into a single IP network for greater interoperability, improved communications, simplified management, and lower costs

Meet governmental and industrial safety compliance requirements

 

As rail operators like to introduce new business models and value-added services to increase ridership, one can count on Cisco to deploy highly secure, flexible IP networks. Cisco’s ruggedized routers, switches, access points, and video cameras are being deployed at trackside, in stations, and on trains.

Cisco IOx: Real World Benefits for Railway Industry

Whether it’s a passenger train in a bustling city or a freight train slithering through the mountainside, news of derailment is a tragic story. You may have heard about the fatal train accident in New York City’s Bronxor the recent incident in Philadelphia where a train hauling crude oil was dangling over a river. The US federal government has seen more oil spilled in rail incidents in 2013 than was spilled in the nearly four decades since it began collecting data. The demand for preventative measures is greater than ever.

Train derailment is typically due to equipment failure, specifically in the ball bearings of a wheel. Today, train operators have routine schedules to swap out wheels and engines without fully knowing if the equipment is used beyond repair. Or in worse case scenarios, damaged equipment is not replaced in time to prevent failure and accidents. In addition to performance, train operators face fierce competition from alternative transportation providers and must find ways to offer better amenities and services to retain and attract new passengers.

With Cisco IOx, an 819 router sitting on a freight train can monitor the ball-bearings and monitor the utility of bearing to let you know if its overheating or has worn down to a lower-threshold of useful material. An alert can be sent to the train operator notifying him to pull over at the next available station or to stop and repair the wheel.

Cisco Transportation Smart Solutions for Railways

Cisco Transportation Smart Solution (TSS) for Rail is the underlying architecture for a set of highly secure validated network designs. Cisco’s building-block approach means one can start with any combination of solutions, and add others later. Validated network designs minimize deployment risk and speed time to market. TSS includes Cisco and third-party network products, and Cisco Services designed specifically for rail and mass transit. Today, TSS includes Cisco Connected Rail and Premium Mobile Broadband.

Cisco Connected Rail Resources

Cisco Transportation Smart Solution At-a-Glance and Solution Overview

Cisco Services for Transportation Smart Solution

Cisco Connected Rail At-a-Glance and Solution Overview

Cisco Positive Train Control At-a-Glance and Solution Overview

Cisco Premium Mobile Broadband At-a-Glance and Solution Overview

Cisco Validated Design (CVD)

Cisco Connected Rail Network Architecture

Key Products

Network Connectivity for Rail – Switching

IE 2000 Series Switches

3000 Series and 3010 Series Switches

Embedded Service 2020 Series Switches

2520 Connected Grid Switch

Network Connectivity for Rail – Routing and Mobility

819 Integrated Services Router

Connected Grid Router 2000/2010

Embedded Services Routers – ESR 5915, ESR 5921, ESR 5940

ASR 900 Series Aggregation Services Routers

ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers

Connected Mobile Experiences

Wireless Access Points for Rail

Aironet 3500 Series Access Points

Connected Safety and Security for Rail

Video Surveillance 6000 Series IP Cameras

Video Surveillance Manager

IP Interoperability and Collaboration System (IPICS)

More Cisco Solutions for Rail

Digital Signs for Stations and Trains

Unified Communications Manager (CallManager)

Debuting the Autonomic Train at Cisco Live

At Cisco Live, the train includes our Cisco IE2000 industrial switches (IP67 and non IP67 versions), Cisco-819 M2M router, our target application hosting server-PC with VSMS and an even smaller application hosting server – a Raspberry PI.

Every car also hosts our ruggedized Cisco-IPVSC-6050 cameras and a demo version of a passenger information system (PIS) with both outside-train LCD and top-of-seat LCD panels. This is built on a Arduino/Linux prototype platform. Cameras and PIS-devices are PoE powered from our switches.

This setup shows how Cisco IOS networking infrastructure can provide an agile platform for in-train convenience applications – PIS, Surveillance, Internet, Media Streaming, etc. With IP connected client devices, these business applications can be built as easily as web applications – and they can equally easily be expanded and adopted to changing requirements. Given how most train operators already use Web development for outside-train applications such as eCommerce/business-process/web presence/ticketing, this makes it easy for them to build out such convenience application in their trains.

A key component of making these business applications work automatically in a train environment is topology awareness of the train: Every time train cars and engines are being put together to form a train, the business applications need to adopt to the new train topology.

The PIS shows on every car the right logical car number and directions where the beginning and end of train are.  The surveillance application is able to display the right camera for every car. Online seat reservations are equally enabled with this IP connected train technology. PIS display shows how many seats are free in each direction on the train – which is different on every car.

When trains are known to drive in reverse order, renumbering of seats can take place. This renumbering could be intelligent and allows passengers to book a seat in or against the direction of the train, so the seat is guaranteed even when cars are turned around because seats will automatically be renumbered when this happens.

Most of these use case workflows are being shown at Cisco Live with the written demo/prototype application: purely web based, browser on a tablet as the user interface for passengers and train personnel.

To make the development of such convenience applications easier, we leverage a new common cross-market segment software architecture in IOS that is today unique to Cisco.

Autonomic Networking (AN). AN is already shipping on Service Provider IOS platforms and is currently being integrated into the IE and enterprise switch platforms to ship later in 2014/early 2015. Autonomic Networking is bundled within Cisco’s overall “Plug & Play” Software architecture. The core benefits of our Autonomic Networking infrastructure software are secure zero touch device/network bootstrap and automatically built reliable connectivity for ongoing provisioning, monitoring and troubleshooting. AN also enables intelligent autonomic network wide services.

The Autonomic Topology service is one of the first intelligent network-wide services that we plan to ship: Talking only to a single device in the network, a business application can retrieve the full topology of the (train) network including all the relevant information about connected client devices such as cameras or PIS client devices. This topology information is even available when parts of the network are either configured incorrectly, or not configured at all.