Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome! Dobro pozhalovat’! Velkommen!
Welcome to RailCOMPLETE® – the key to modern and efficient modeling of railway infrastructure
RailCOMPLETE turns your model into an electronic relay stick which enables owners, designers, contractors and testers to organize and edit railway data as well as produce tables, 2D drawings and 3D visualizations for large multi-discipline railway infrastructure projects. RailCOMPLETE offers support during design, ready-for-construction reviews, construction, acceptance testing and as-built documentation. RailCOMPLETE keeps data synchronized and updated and automates the tedious process of producing consistent and error-free tables and drawings. Just move your objects and edit their properties as needed, click the Refresh button and export your model with updated and consistent tables, drawings and 3D visualization.
RailCOMPLETE is a CAD system plug-in
RailCOMPLETE operates as a plug-in to your CAD system, which means that you must have access to a compatible CAD system running on a reasonably powerful computer. Currently, RailCOMPLETE will run under the three most recent editions of AutoCAD®, either plain AutoCAD or one of the many add-on editions such as Map 3D, Civil 3D etc. RailCOMPLETE may not work fully with ‘Lite’ versions (LT), ‘student edition’ versions (SE) or free trial versions of the CAD system.
RailCOMPLETE is a professional and versatile tool
RailCOMPLETE has been developed in order to provide professionals within the railway infrastructure community with a versatile and modern tool for entering, visualizing, editing, checking and exporting information. As the usage of RailCOMPLETE expands, all involved parties will enjoy the freedom and the ease of sharing complex and detailed information in projects and in operations.
RailCOMPLETE is based on a safe data format
In addition to storing drawing details in the DWG format, RailCOMPLETE fully exploits the meta-data storage features of AutoCAD. This means that data such as model names, article codes, relations between different objects, construction stage information etc is stored in a de facto standard AutoCAD format. RailCOMPLETE has been designed to protect internal data from inadvertent tampering. In addition, there are many ways to audit the integrity of a RailCOMPLETE model and to repair damaged data.
RailCOMPLETE protects your engineering investment
RailCOMPLETE has been designed to withstand the cruel effects of time. As time passes by, software and file formats will eventually be replaced with newer versions. Customers change the way they represent their assets, spare parts go out of production and new asset variants appear. The AutoCAD suite of tools and file formats have been backwards compatible since the 1990’s, in the sense that newer versions can always read older files and convert them to a more recent file format. Commands and internal computer interfaces are seldom deprecated, only expanded. Since a RailCOMPLETE computer file is a plain AutoCAD DWG file, we believe that it will continue to be readable also in the decades to come.
RailCOMPLETE genetics – Definition of Network Assets – DNA
The challenge of changing assets over time has been met in RailCOMPLETE by mimicking the powerful concepts found in genetics. Picture a railway project as a living creature, and a single computer file as one of its many cells. RailCOMPLETE models this creature’s tiniest parts using a kind of ‘genetic code’, which we call the Definition of Network Assets, or ‘DNA’ for short. The objects that are created within the computer model are all predefined in the model’s DNA, and the whole DNA sequence is stored in every RailCOMPLETE computer file, just as the whole DNA code will be found in every cell of a body. In a healthy normal individual – i.e., in a well-managed railway project – all computer files share the same DNA, just as all cells in a body share the same DNA. If a computer file is introduced with different, but still compatible DNA, then minor issues may arise, similar to an immune system response in a living individual.
Upgrading the DNA
In order to upgrade an existing object’s model files to a more recent version of the DNA, RailCOMPLETE provides a mapping mechanism which involves replacement of the file’s DNA as well as upgrading the file’s existing objects from their old representations into their new representations. This process of changing the DNA code in your railway project shall be repeated for every DNA-containing computer file, and RailCOMPLETE provides automated support.
New object functionality can be introduced into old RailCOMPLETE files simply by changing the DNA and refreshing the objects in the file. Each RailCOMPLETE object typically contains many references to functions written in the Lua programming language. When an object is refreshed, each of its referenced functions will be executed. By upgrading the computer code contained in the DNA for such Lua functions, the objects will display their new behaviour the next time they are refreshed.
RailCOMPLETE Agents
The people making changes to an existing DNA – the genetic mutations, if you like – are so-called ‘RailCOMPLETE Agents’. A RailCOMPLETE agent is a trusted company which knows your local railway administration’s needs in detail, and which also knows the inner workings of the RailCOMPLETE software. Whenever a new object needs modeling, or an existing one needs to be adjusted, then the agent will provide this service on behalf of the local railway administration. The agent may be part of the administration itself, or it may be a competent local engineering company. The agent will make the new DNA accessible for download to all relevant registered users working for the railway administration, and local superusers will guide their colleagues in the DNA update process.
RailCOMPLETE Patches
Although we should avoid it, from time to time there will be a need for changing an existing function’s inner way of working such that the model data for a railway project must be modified in ways that the ordinary DNA update process cannot handle, i.e. modification of existing objects that were created using a previous DNA. In such cases the RailCOMPLETE development team provides a so-called ‘patch’ on the download site. This patch is simply yet another RailCOMPLETE command that you download and install on your computer, and which will usually be run automatically when needed – the patch figures out this by itself.
The RailCOMPLETE Business Case
Using RailCOMPLETE for your projects over time will boost the quality of the following processes:
- Data referencing between different engineering entities in your project
- Data sharing between different companies, or between consultant, customer and operations
- Data format longevity
- Re-use of data – unpack your old projects and find model data there in a still readable format
- Re-use of data – each link in the chain from conception to operations adds to the existing model
- Increased data quality – each link checks and refines data from its predecessor
- Cross-discipline integrity checking of the model – everyone works in one connected model
- Premium quality on-site construction drawings and data sheets
- Premium quality as-built data base contents
FITS ANY RAILWAY
MODELS EVERY OBJECT
CONNECTS EVERYONE