Rail Transit Consultants has many years of experience integrating complex Light Rail Vehicle (LRV) subsystems. This includes the Monitoring and Diagnostic System (MDS). The RTC approach is to use the latest service-proven off the shelf equipment that will meet or exceed the specification requirements. There are qualified companies that provide the transit industry with the latest hardware that will satisfy the tough transit industry standards. RTC integrates the latest state of the art transit grade equipment available from these companies to stay current with quickly changing technology. This approach permits us to focus on hardware integration and to concentrate on what is the heart of the monitoring system, the software. RTC has developed an Ethernet based MDS and Communications System that is operating on the ameriTRAMTM. This approach incorporates rugged industrial and transit qualified components from multiple sources, integrated into a complete system that is open source.

The software includes adapting the Human Machine Interface (HMI), which includes the event or fault screen, the operational status screens, CCTV and the maintenance screens for each customer’s requirements. In the past some specifications have required that subsets of the subsystem Portable Test Unit (PTU) functionality be located in the MDS. The HMI software can launch and load the PTU software for a particular subsystem logic unit. The MDS has the complete functionality of PTU software and acts just as if the user were directly plugged in to the subsystems logic. This provides the user a single point in the LRV in which they can perform PTU functionality to any of the LRV logic units. It also permits the user to access any of the rail vehicles in the yard to test a subsystem without having to get a secondary piece of equipment (i.e., laptop). Additionally, if a wireless laptop is available there is no need to plug-in.

We have experience in working with many industry standards including IEEE-1346, IEEE-1348, IEEE-1342 and IEEE-1473 (L and E).

RTC has engineering staff that has been certified in the advance uses of National Instruments LabVIEW® software and certified in Echelons® advanced networking design.This staff has been designing, developing and interating embedded system in multiple hardware platforms for many years.