Traffic Control Centres Communication (TCCCom)

Communication between Traffic Control Centers

Nowadays, RNE is covering more than 200 different border stations on 43 different state borders. Officially, 21 different national languages are used between RNE members. Therefore, the problems in communication between traffic control centres could vary very much depending on which IM’s are involved.

Several Projects to improve communication are ongoing:



From a long term perspective, RNE is deeply involved in the Implementation of the TAF TSI. All TAF TSI working groups are trying to tackle all the possible needed information flows between IM and Rus (also the one identified today as missing) so at the end, implementation of the results of these WGs will have a positive effect on the improvement of communication.

Apart from the TAF TSI Implementation, which is foreseen from 2013 on, RNE started, already some years before, with development of Train Information System (TIS, formerly EUROPTIRAILS) and Path Coordination System (PCS, formerly PATHFINDER) as tools for facilitating the communication between the involved partners. All these developments are based on the defined business processes and so made to fit the business needs.

It is clear, that before IT solutions will be available, the short term, pragmatic solutions for improving the communication especially on Operations level between Traffic Control Centers are needed. Therefore, RNE decided to start a new project focusing on fast actions to improve the day to day communication between different Traffic control centres during the operations. Based on the interviewing the dispatching staff of several IMs companies, the main communication problem was identified:

• Who is my partner?
• How can i talk to him?

To solve both these problems, TCCCom tool, supporting multilingual communication between traffic control centres and providing contact information to the dispatching centres, was developed.

The TCCCom Tool is available in 2 environments:

• Test system: used for presentation and training purposes (no real information exchange behind)
• Production system: real time application used by dispatching staff for information exchange

The first pilot application of Production system is already in place between ÖBB and RFI dispatching centres. Additional pilot applications between different dispatching centers are planned as follows:

• Group 1: DB Netz – SZDC, SZDC – ÖBB / from August 2011
• Group 2: ZSR – ÖBB, ÖBB – MAV, MAV – ZSR / from August 2011
• Group 3: RFI – RFF / from July 2011