A case study of development of the transportation plan and the operation control system for a high-speed railway using a relational database

We renewed the transportation planning and the operation control systems for the high-speed railways of the East Japan Railway (JRE) using a relational database management architecture in 2008. The JRE has five bullet train lines (SHINKANSEN). It has an information system named COSMOS to control and operate SHINKANSEN properly. The transportation planning sub-system has six function groups which are developed by different manufacturing companies. We decided to adopt an integrated relational database model and database interfaces in order to restrain consistency failure of database transactions. We chose NS solutions (NSSOL) as the manufacturing company for database modeling and interface development, since NSSOL has deep knowledge and experiences to construct a database model for railways. We and NSSOL designed and developed the database that has about 1400 tables which contain several hundred gigabytes of data. Since we developed the database on our own, we are able to understand the whole structure of the database CRUD (Create, Read, Update or Delete data on database) and to fix failures in the architecture.