Eclipse on Rails and Rockets

Marc R. Hoffmann, Gilles J. Iachelini, Mark Powell

Eclipse Platform - UI / RCP · Long - main stage
Thursday, 10:10, 50 minutes | Theater

Marc R. Hoffmann

Gilles J. Iachelini

Mark Powell

The Swiss Federal Railway and NASA team up to present how Eclipse RCP has made an impact on technical solutions for operations of railroads and robots.

SBB Infrastruktur operates the railway network with the highest utilization in the world: every day 9,000 trains travel on routes with an overall length of 3,000 km. SBB Infrastruktur provides services to national as well as international train operators and ensure that their trains arrive safely and on-time. In 2004 the project Rail Control System (RCS) has been started to provide a unified operations platform for several aspects of maintaining and running the SBB railway network.

From the beginning Eclipse IDE is used as the development platform; Eclipse RCP is the foundation of the RCS user interfaces. The train dispatcher’s work place is multi-window Eclipse workbench typically running on eight high resolution screens. Near real time data processing has to ensure that the live traffic situation is visually reflected in all details. Based on a variety of graphical diagrams including a forecast of the train movements for the next two hours the dispatchers are responsible for short-term decision-making and planning.

While this talk is an Eclipse consumer story, it will have a strong technical focus on railroad networks as well as some Eclipse RCP aspects of the project.

Since Eclipse 3.0, NASA has used the Rich Client Platform to build software tools to operate the Mars Exploration Rovers. This short talk will give an overview of the many new projects that are enabled by the Eclipse platform and related technologies:

Lunar habitat and exploration vehicle prototype development
prototype balloons and airships for exploring Titan, Venus and Mars
enabling mission success of the Phoenix Mars lander
mapping Mars from orbit with Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the surface with Mars Exploration Rovers
collaborative planning for the next Mars rover, the Mars Science Laboratory

We will discuss how NASA has used many Eclipse projects in its software tools including RCP, EMF, GEF, GMF, CDO, OSGi-ReST and the SWT-OpenGL binding

See how Eclipse is helping us explore worlds beyond our home planet.

Marc works as an independent consultant and was involved in the development of several commercial as well as open source Eclipse/RCP based projects and software products since 2004. At SBB Marc contributes to the Eclipse based real-time user interfaces of the Rail Control System (RCS) system.

Gilles is a software architect for the CSC located in Bern, Switzerland, working on a Client Application of a Realtime Disposition System for the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) based on Eclipse RCP.

Dr. Mark Powell is a Senior Computer Scientist in the Planning Software Systems Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Mark and his group create software tools to operate Mars surface missions and support technology development for future missions to the Moon and the planets of our solar system.