Ada in the Hong Kong Urban Rail System

Ada in the Hong Kong Urban Rail System

[Michael Feldman]

Ada in the Hong Kong Urban Rail System

(source: Ada World Dialogue, vol. 8, no. 2, Summer 1994)

Alsys' AdaWorld native and cross development environments will he used
by GEC-Alsthom to generate the command system for the new Hong Kong
subway system.

On behalf of the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway Corporation, the Lantau
and Airport Railway (LAR) will link the island of Hong Kong, via the
business center of Kowloon, to the island of Lantau and the new airport
under construction. The trains will serve the 13 railway stations of the
34 km-long express line every 2 to 4 minutes at speeds up to 135 km per
hour. Completion of the new railway system is scheduled for mid-1997.

Unlike the Cairo and Calcutta transport projects developed by
GEC-Alsthom, the integrated command system for the LAR will be both
centralized and local. This means that train flow, traffic regulation,
and automatic schedule control are executed locally in each railway
station, while centralized supervision operations are carried out by the
main command center.

A team of 15 software engineers will be responsible for the Automatic
Train Supervision application, writing an estimated 170,000 lines of
code. In addition to train flow, traffic regulation and schedule
planning and control, the program will include data collection for
establishing statistics. They will be using the AdaWorld native compiler
product set for HP 9000/400 and AdaWorld cross development environment
for SPARC-hosted to Intel/Multibus 11 targets.