Inside VicTrack's Network Management Centre

Seven days per week, 24 hours per day, Victoria’s transport infrastructure is safeguarded by a state-of-the-art management centre.

VicTrack owns Victoria’s transport land, assets and infrastructure. With much of its asset portfolio dedicated to transport — land, infrastructure, trams and trains, and telecommunication networks — its focus is on strategic asset management and supporting the delivery of better transport solutions.

As asset manager and a provider of core services to the transport sector, it fulfils various roles and functions to ensure the assets serve Victoria now and into the future. It has three specialist delivery groups — Property, Telecommunications and Project Delivery — which are supported by Communications & Engagement and Business Services.

VicTrack provides telecommunication infrastructure and services to many customers, such as Public Transport Victoria, Metro Trains Melbourne, Yarra Trams, V/Line and NTT-DATA (myki ticketing system), as well as other government agencies and some non-government entities.

“As a licensed telecommunication carrier, with network infrastructure that spans the state of Victoria, we provide a full suite of telecommunications services to the transport and government sector,” said Bruce Moore, general manager of VicTrack’s Telecommunications Group.

“We design, deploy and deliver network infrastructure solutions to support telecommunication outcomes, and provide business communications, security surveillance including data services and hosting for our customers.

“We provide 24-hour network management and monitoring, including planned and emergency repair and maintenance, to ensure the highest standards of reliability for the transport system,” he added.

Central to the Telecommunications Group’s mission is its Network Management Centre (NMC), located at Docklands in the heart of Melbourne. VicTrack established the NMC towards the end of 2008 — with staff operating the centre from Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm — and transitioned to a 24/7 fully manned operational centre by December 2009. More recently, an opportunity arose to upgrade the centre and its facilities.

“We were expanding our office space at VicTrack’s headquarters in Docklands, incorporating another level of the building into our tenancy,” said Moore. “This gave us the opportunity to relocate the NMC into a new location in the building and incorporate updated technologies.”

Communications systems

The NMC is responsible for monitoring power failures, communication line alarms (such as bit errors, framing errors, line coding errors and circuits down) and other performance issues that may affect the network and have an adverse effect on VicTrack’s customers and users.

The NMC currently provides 24/7 network monitoring of all of VicTrack’s telecommunications network, including data storage and data monitoring. Some of the infrastructure and technologies monitored and managed include:

• fibre and copper networks
• SDH (synchronous digital hierarchy) and PDH (plesiochronous digital hierarchy) networks
• DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) network
• UHF radio
• IP/MPLS (Internet Protocol/Multiprotocol Label Switching) networks
• cloud technology
• unified communications
• other legacy systems.

Some of the services monitored are:

• data WAN
• voice (analog and digital)
• point-to-point and point-to-multipoint
• wireless
• radio services
• internet
• cloud
• managed storage
• unified communications
• security access monitoring.

And the customer applications supported are:

• passenger information displays
• red (emergency) and green (information) platform buttons
• public announcements
• train radio communications (DTRS & RRCN)
• myki ticketing system
• SCADA
• voice platforms
• CCTV
• signalling
• station lift monitoring.

Inside the centre

The NMC brings in views for managing the live status of VicTrack’s telecommunication infrastructure network, and NMC staff are responsible for monitoring networks for conditions that may require special attention to avoid degraded service.

The centre is laid out with several rows of desks, all facing a video wall, which typically shows details of highly significant alarm status, ongoing incidents and general network performance. A corner of the wall is used for showing a news or weather TV channel, as this can keep the staff aware of current events which may affect the network or systems they are responsible for. NMC personnel have multiple monitors on their desks, with which they supervise the systems or networks.

The side wall is glazed, with the attached room used as an incident response room by members of the team responsible for managing major incidents, while still allowing them to watch events unfolding within the NMC. The incident response room is equipped with audio and video conferencing capability.

The NMC also has a train driver simulation unit known as the In-Cabin Equipment (ICE) unit, which is used for driver and field simulation fault finding and testing. Also located within the NMC are primary servers and other equipment essential to running the transport infrastructure network, plus an equipment room/test area that is used for the provisioning testing and configuration of critical spares.

The In-Cabin Equipment unit is used to simulate fault finding and testing.

The NMC drives incident resolution either remotely — with a first-in fixed rate at 80% — or through specialised field teams and Tier 3 support engineers, who are available 24/7. It deals with around 80 incidents and 3000 calls per week, and handles approximately 495 planned work activities per month.

The centre is replicated at a disaster recovery site (DRS) at a geographically diverse location. The DRS facility has been commissioned as a hot standby site with no network/services switchover required.

“The NMC managing and monitoring is operated fully from the DRS facility to ensure total redundancy is available at any time, as it provides the same functionality as the Docklands NMC although not at the same scale,” said Moore. “This set-up has proven to be very efficient and timely in emergency events where a relocation of the team is required.”

As with the introduction of any major new or upgraded system, dealing with the consequences of change was crucial. “With the introduction of the VicTrack NMC, VicTrack realised the importance of the change management processes to control network changes and minimise impact on the operational network,” said Moore. “The NMC has reviewed and technically assessed all network changes, with the number of changes averaging to 495 per month compared to 276 changes per month five years ago.”

“The impact of technological change was a major driver in the consideration for requirements and systems [in the new NMC],” added Moore. “This included integrating and enabling new functionality as new surveillance and control options become available, as well as considerations for changes in the way people will travel.

“The new NMC has enabled and enhanced VicTrack’s ability to manage multi-agency incident and operations management systems, thereby improving network efficiency and safety,” he added.

Images courtesy VicTrack

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook