The Client
Is the British rail industry membership body that brings together passenger and freight rail companies, Network Rail and High Speed 2. The company was set up by the train operators to ensure nationwide services – such as ticket acceptance and railcards – continued after the privatization of the railways under the Railways Act 1993.
Project Background
Rail Availability & Reservation Service (RARS), a major IT iniative program which had been envisioned to phase out existing legacy IT services in a gradual manner and provide SaaS based IT services to the nationwide Train Operating Companies (TOCs) with modern IT platform and infrastructure to support and provide better quality of service (QoS) to the end customers. The program was planned and executed in phase-wise manner.
Phase 1 of RARS2 was focused on the delivery of a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) replacement of NRS and a migration of all TOCs onto the RARS2 Platform through the utilisation of the RDG RARS Broker.
Phase 2 focuses on the delivery of new functionality and improved information feeds through the RARS platform. A new reservation interface, live service and operating model were being included as workstreams of the delivery.
Challenges
A complex IT program can't go unnoticed without challenges during its design and delivery life cycles. Some of the key concerns or challenges worth mentioned here.
- Around 59 REST API based microservices with medium ot high complexity were designed, developed and delivered as RARS broker. The Quality of Services (QoS) were critical concerns to achieve such as 250 TPS, 1sec response time considering applying complex business rules and transformation.
- Interoperabilty of services newly designed and developed with existing legacy services while mainting data quality and intregity
- The enterprise level domain model design for rail and reservation which should be streamlined for future business focus and also supports legacy data model for acheiving interoperabilty with existing legacy system(s)
- Intergation with 3rd party services to perform CRUD (create, Read, Update and Delete) on rail and reservations data keeping integration as fault tolerent and higly responsive. The intergation also design and developed to handle partial success of API data transactions.
The Solution Delivered
The technologies used in the development and implementation of the solution are
- Around 59 REST API based mircroservices with medium ot high complexity were designed, developed and delivered. Mulesoft Anypoint platform for API design and delivery, System Integration, auditing, and logging
- Amazon AWS cloud plaftform services such IAM for service security,S3 bucket for metadata services and support
- REST ful API Integration with 3rd party system (S3 Sqills platform) for rail and reservation data
