RIG-A New Management Information System for Railway Transportation

A grid technology together with data warehouse and mediator is used to develop the railway transport management information system (TMIS), which is aiming at managing and publishing all kinds of enterprise resources among dynamic collections of such information systems with heterogeneous architectures and distributed in geography within Chinese Ministry of Railway. As one logical information integration framework and a uniform interface for accessing resources, a prototype named railway information grid (RIG) is proposed. Its main modules and the key technologies, together with its feasibility, are discussed in detail. RIG can not only provide the integral information service and the interoperability of information at the application level, but also bring us such benefits as: easy use, high efficiency, and reasonable total cost of ownership.