User Services of CyberRail -- Toward System Architecture of Future Railway --

Ever since the dawning of computers and its related technologies, railway has been one of the major application domains in which wide variety of information and communication technologies are successfully utilized. Substantial efforts have been made in such fields as transportation planning, passenger information services (including seat reservations), train control, and train traffic management. It should be pointed out, however, that these core technologies in each field of railways have been developed independently with little consideration on the relationship with other system components. Collection of locally optimized systems does not always lead to a "globally" optimized railway system. When building a large-scale complicated information system, it is of vital importance for us to make a comprehensive description of the overall structure of the system and to clarify the relationship among component elements, so that we can share a common knowledge of the system we are going to build and that we can promote the efficient development and implementation of the effectively integrated system. An example of a comprehensive description (i.e. system architecture) of a large-scale transportation system can be seen in the field of ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems). Unfortunately, however, the ITS system architecture of Japan, which was made public in 1999, tend to place too much emphasis on road transport, thus lacking the standpoint from railways. This is why we have started the study on the system architecture of next-generation IT-oriented railway systems(which we call "CyberRail"). As the first step to the system architecture of CyberRail, we are now discussing its "user services". Here we use the term "user service" in the similar sense as is used in ITS. A user service is a description of a particular service or a particular functionality of transportation, with the emphasis on the relationship between service users and service providers. In other words, the notion of of "users" may include all the stakeholders of railway and the word is not used in the narrow sense which only refers to passengers and/or consignors. Passengers, railway operators, operators of other transport modes (buses, taxis, etc.), travel agents, information providers, shops, etc. can be a user of CyberRail. In this paper, we describe the four user services of CyberRail which we are currently discussing at RTRI, i.e. (1)Intermodal Information Providing and Personal Navigation,(2) Distribution and Exchange of Railway-related Information in Open Information Environment,(3) Demand-oriented Transportation Planning and Rescheduling,(4) Intelligent Train Control. We emphasize that these four services are mutually dependent and it is of vital importance to clarify the interaction among diverse subsystems before going into implementation details of each services.