Facility Management Italy

Project Introduction: GIS Railway in Italy was seeking to develop a VOIP system for their railway applications. They wanted an infrastructure that featured a redundant SHDSL line and allowed connection to a variety of devices, from modern IP interfaces to old analog telephones. This project was very important, as it would lay the foundation for their communications system for many years to come, with many upgrades and expansions already planned.

System Requirements:
The Italian railway company was looking to upgrade their telephone infrastructure to allow integration with advanced features and functions for different environments with redundancy and remote control capabilities. This led to the following requirements:

• 3,000 VDC surge protection on the power line
• Products with a wide operating temperature range (up to 60° C)
• Relay output for event alarms on the Ethernet switch
• Redundant power inputs on the Ethernet switch
  

Project Implementation:

	EKI-2528	8-port Unmanaged Industrial Ethernet Switch
	UNO-2170	Fanless Box PC with 2 x LAN, 4 x COM and PC/104
	TPC-1570H	15” XGA TFT LCD Touch Panel Computer

System Diagram:

System Description:
By integrating Advantech’s EKI-2528 Ethernet switch, GIS Railway was able to setup a redundant ring across the entire network. It is made with 2 pairs of fiber cables and SHDSL modems. The EKI switches are connected to the modems and connect the phones in the central operation center, the operation managers phone, maintenance, loudspeakers, the telephones on the railway, the VOIP Server (UNO-2170) and the system’s HMI (TPC). If the phone is not VOIP ready, an adapter is used to connect switch and phone.

The TPCs are on the desk of the system managers and are used as the HMI devices. The software on the TPC shows all the connections available on the line, and allows the TPCs to communicate with the servers, trace calls, call someone as a normal phone, create and upload audio messages for the loudspeakers, and activate communications between 2 different types of equipment. Equipment is monitored with remote alarms and it is possible to program it using the onboard web server.

The UNO-2170 works as a VOIP server and runs Windows XPe.

Conclusion:
This new GISAV system has since become a standard VOIP architecture for Italian railways. GIS Railway has been presenting the application to many customers and a demo plant is ready for the demonstrations at the vertical sector exhibitions. Advantech is proud to have supplied high-quality industrial products for this system with local customer support to help implement a state-of-the-art solution for GIS Railway.