The brief

South Western Railway were faced with a contract renewal of a legacy system. In an effort to both reduce costs and provide a solution to the business that provided more capability against requirements, we developed Zonda.

Zonda is a real-time fleet support tool for engineering teams, control centres and depots, which takes in live OTMR (black box) data and displays a visualisation of each trains’ data with rules-based alerts, so that faults while trains are in service can be quickly identified and resolved.

What we did

The initial objective for Zonda was to provide a like for like replacement that could be developed further to address existing challenges identified by users of the outgoing system, including:

1. Data deletion after one month due to storage and capacity limitations
2. Users having to retract business rules to remove existing events from view as there was no way to close events
3. Causing the solution to slow or fail, if a user inadvertently created a complex rule
4. Poor adoption due to the complexity and difficulty of creating business rules 

Users are now able to construct their own business rules on any of the 50 data channels that are streamed from each SWR train in real-time, enabling alerts to be identified when the threshold for that data is exceeded.

The product and roadmap are a collaborative exercise between Mistral Data and SWR, constantly identifying business challenges and areas for development to incrementally and continuously improve Zonda, and ultimately the value to the business and users.

Since deployment over 150 development items have been added to Zonda, including:

1. Iterative improvements to data quality including lab checking every channel card against data received in Zonda
2. Continual improvement to the UI/UX to tailor to the requirements of the Zonda users
3. Improvements to rule creation to allow layered, complex rules to be created, edited and cloned
4. Addition of a historical reporting component to analyse past alerts by various categories
5. Migration to One Login to allow more efficient and secure user management
6. Rule alerting to include email distribution to non-Zonda users
7. TPWS Mk4 ingest to enrich Zonda with more channel reporting