Huawei Urban Rail Cloud Helps Shanghai Metro Build a Smart COCC

Background

In May 2007, Shanghai Shentong Metro Group upgraded the general duty room in Hengtong Building, run by its subsidiary Shanghai Metro Operation Company Limited, into a COCC to meet requirements for multi-line comprehensive monitoring and coordinated command. As Shanghai Metro embraced networked operations, the old COCC could not keep pace with business development due to the limited number of accessed lines, monitoring without control, and insufficient multi-line operation capabilities. To address the need for multi-line operational dispatching and command, the Group planned to upgrade and reinvent the COCC, and build the C3 dispatch and command building that integrates the COCC (ETC), 7 networked sub-centers, and the OCCs of 21 lines.

Shanghai Shentong Metro Group Co., Ltd. (Shanghai Metro) takes charge of rail transit construction and operations in Shanghai. The company operates one of the world’s largest rapid transit networks. As of December 2017, it has 16 lines (including a maglev line) with a total length of 666 kilometers and 389 stations. By 2020, the number of operating lines will increase to 24, and metro riders will account for 60 percent of the city’s public transportation volume.

Challenges

The legacy COCC system was constructed years ago. It only managed a small scale of multi-line operations, and had limited functions and technical means that could not accommodate new business growth. Major weaknesses of the legacy system included:

The small capacity could only support the basic rail transportation network. A few lines were loosely associated when the legacy COCC was established. Therefore, its significance did not stand out in terms of system positioning, functionality, and scale.

Facing the transition from single-line to multi-line urban rail operations, the system lacked collaborative emergency response and command capabilities in terms of dispatching of professionals, repair staff, and materials, as well as information sharing, and multi-source instruction delivery.

New requirements for multi-line operations management have been growing, for example operations planning, safety assurance, supervision and command, incident handling, and information release.

Solution

Huawei FusionCloud is a business-driven data center solution that supports physically scattered and logically unified resources, collaboration between the cloud and networks, and service awareness. Such data centers facilitate the sustainable service development of enterprises and organizations and meet full lifecycle management requirements. Based on the FusionCloud Private Cloud Solution, Huawei provides the Urban Rail Cloud Solution tailored to industry-specific scenarios, which helps explore the best practices in urban rail cloud transformation and contributes to a future-proof, multi-line information platform.

At the network layer, two independent networks are designed, one for the production network domain and the other for the management network domain, with firewalls deployed for strict security control and separation.

At the cloud platform layer, different VDCs are designed for the production network domain and management network domain to ensure security isolation between the service resource pools. The production network VDC is further divided into multiple VPCs for different service systems, preventing unauthorized access between the service systems.

Benefits

A multi-line, multi-system information platform has been constructed based on cloud computing technologies, implementing unified applications, information sharing, and data management.

The unified data warehouse supports emerging service trends such as passenger flow dispatching and predictive maintenance through effective information integration.

Resources are centralized to improve resource usage and O&M efficiency, and reduce OPEX.

Huawei’s solution strictly complies with China’s national Level 3 information security standards and provides all-round cloud security protection schemes for the C3 platform. The customer, free from security worries, can focus more on building ICT-based systems. The customer’s resource utilization has been improved by up to 50 percent to 70 percent, and the investment is under control.

The unified O&M management platform supports automatic service rollout and intelligent analysis of device status. The simplified management contributes to agile operations and reduces labor costs by more than 30 percent.