BEST-L, a system for long-term planning of track access

Bane NOR is under the Norwegian Railway Directorate and owns railway tracks, platforms, waiting rooms, stations, electrical installations, signal and safety installations for traffic control, and telecommunications in Norway. In addition to maintaining the railway network, Bane NOR's tasks are to offer railway companies a safe and efficient transport system, plan timetables, and allocate track capacity.

The system aims to contribute to a safe, appropriate, and efficient capacity allocation process of the railway network. Railway companies should be able to easily register orders, while the tool should ensure that Bane NOR receives correct and all necessary information required by the capacity allocation process.

Previously, orders for long-term planned trains were sent in with Excel sheets, and negotiations were conducted via phone and email. The information was continuously entered manually by planners at Bane NOR.

BEST-L is a web application implemented with modern frameworks and tools. Inspiration has been drawn from social media such as Facebook and Spotify in the design and implementation of functionality for discussions and notifications in the application. Complex logic for route calculation has been reused from Bane NOR's distribution portal FIDO. An order for a train plan can be entered manually but since BEST-L handles the XML schema Railway Markup Language (railML®), it is possible to copy trains from last year's train plan in the train route planning system (TPS) or import a train plan from other external systems. Planners at each railway company can change their order until the set deadline. After the deadline, all changes are made by Bane NOR's planners in TPS. An integration between TPS and BEST-L allows changes to be transparent until a proposal is finalized.

See the user manual for a detailed functional description at https://www.banenor.no/for-deg-i-bransjen/togselskap/verktoy-og-systemer/.

Jonatan has participated in the project from the early implementation phase with detailed specification of tasks, estimation and planning. He has participated in daily work with stand-up meetings, programming, peer reviews, documentation, sprint planning, retrospectives and demos together with users. In collaboration with the project's architect, he has taken responsibility for ensuring that the code is clean and open for further development and maintenance. To achieve this, principles such as SOLID, test-driven development and continuous development have been used.

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