The TS Model 4.0 statistic tool |
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Background |
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In North America, railways have been operated by private companies (and not by a superordinate state) right from the start. For this reason, there have always been a multitude of railway companies in the United States and Canada ever since the beginning of the 20th century, and all these companies own certain parts of the North American railway network. In view of the large dimensions of the continent, these companies predominantly handle goods. For the conveyance of passengers, the much faster airplanes are generally usually used as a means of transport. For the transportation of goods on railcars, the existent railway companies allow each other to use the networks of other railway companies; in order to be able to use this service, fees have to be paid, though, to the owner of the used network. Aside from the bigger railway companies, like Amtrak, Union Pacific or Canadian Pacific Railway, there are also smaller companies which have specialized in leasing railcars to other companies, without owning a certain railway network themselves. In case the fleet of railcars which is operated by a certain company is very large, software systems are being used to monitor and organize the movements of the individual railcars. With the necessary help of such software systems, movements of railcars can be coordinated and optimized, so that empty returns of railcars or inefficient movements can often be avoided and necessary repairs can quickly be applied. As a consequence, the fees that are charged for the use of external networks can be reduced to a minimum. |
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Project information |
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The Trainspotter Suite software system from the Canadian company Radss Technologies allows companies to precisely monitor the movements of their railcars on the North American railway network and to thoroughly plan and optimize the future movements of their wagons. In detail, the Trainspotter Suite is subdivided into several individual software systems, of which each has a different objective:
In order to calculate the estimated time of arrival of a railcar at a particular destination, TS Model uses a so-called regression technique. In the field of statistics, regression techniques are predominantly used to forecast unknown values. One thing all regression techniques have in common is the fact that they all try to establish a model which allows to forecast unknown values on the basis of known values in a way, so that the probability of the calculated values being wrong is as low as possible. One of the simplest regression techniques is the so-called linear regression, which is also used in TS Model. During my stay abroad in Canada (2000/2001), I was employed on a full-time basis at the Canadian company Radss Technologies for a total of 12 months. During that time, I was all by myself responsible for the development of the TS Model software tool's version 4.0. The software was developed using the C++ programming language on a Windows operating system, as a development environment Microsoft's Visual C++ was used. The data of the application was stored in an Oracle database. Two years after the end of my occupation at Radss Technologies, the company was acquired by a company called Intellitrans in August 2003. |
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Related websites |
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The homepage of Intellitrans. This is the company that acquired Radss Technologies in August 2003. The webpage reporting that Radss Technologies was acquired by Intellitrans. |
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