Skip to main content

Eclipse Community Awards Winners Announced: NeTS is finalist

Posted by felipegaucho on March 24, 2009 at 8:42 AM EDT

I usually don't publish any company related news here but this one is special: the NeTS project was announced finalist in the Best Commercial RCP Application category of the Eclipse Community Awards 2009. The great winner of this category was a project called Chord Scale Generator and the other finalist was the ECR - Enregistrement Centralisé en Réseau.

The power of community recognition

To make good contracts and sustain a profitable business depends on business expertise and quality of the the management boards, but to code products that also receives the community recognition is something else - a plus in terms of software quality engineering and a prize for any company that reaches this level of competence - including Netcetera AG. I am not surprised because the Swiss profile is always focused on quality and also because I know the processes and the developers that made NeTS possible, but it is a nice moment to say congratulations NeTS team!

What is NeTS?

NeTS is an acronym for Network-wide Track Management System, a rich client application that allows the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB - Schweizerische Bundesbahnen) to organize its trains timetable. To have a better dimension on the challenge of this project, I copied some quotes from the SBB web site:

  • Every year, SBB transports about 306 million passengers and 54 million net tonnes of freight
  • The Swiss Federal Railway (SBB) manages to operate 96.2% of all trains with less than 5 minutes of delay.
  • The demand is increasing - 6% last year in passenger traffic alone.

Currently planned hardware expansion, with new routes and double capacity trains, is not likely to be ready until 2014. This situation motivated the desire to better exploit existing infrastructure using more ambitious software, hence the Network-wide Track Management System (NeTS).

The project has a lot of technical details, but the important message to remember from this blog is: if you are traveling by train in Switzerland, the timetable of your train was planned with NeTS :)

Blog Links >>