Standardising rail data to improve safety, reliability, and insight
Rail industry data could improve many aspects of rail. These include safety, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and customer satisfaction. Making the most of this data needs good interoperability across data interfaces, but this needs to be better.
Standardisation of data formats would help. A key step in this process is finding which data would benefit the most from standardisation. If more data were available in a standardised format this would also help initiatives to make more use of data. A good example is the Rail Data Marketplace which supports the use of datasets in common formats.
RSSB reviewed and assessed current approaches to standardisation, and then developed a new bespoke method. RSSB’s new Data, Systems and Telematics Standards Committee provided oversight and input for this project.
The bespoke approach can assess candidate areas for standardisation. They can be assessed for the effort needed to standardise them or the value that standardisation would bring. This means that different data areas can be compared and then prioritised.
This new approach identified three priority areas within the scope of DST SC: They are:
- information exchange between traffic management systems and crew and stock systems
- how railway systems identify and use data about time
- the unique identification of train services.
New standards in areas revealed by the new method are being developed.
Data standardisation for time and unique train service identification are progressing as RSSB standards projects. DST SC is providing lead oversight of these projects.
A working group is exploring the standardisation of traffic management and stock and crew data exchanges in more detail.
There is also potential to use this subject-agnostic method in other places. It would be good to run workshops with other stakeholder groups to find and assess other data where standardisation would bring benefits. This is being explored.