A Web-Based System for Interface Management of Metro Equipment Engineering

In recent years, a variety of equipment automatic control systems have been applied to Chinese new metro projects such as Integrated Supervisory Control System(ISCS), Building Automation System(BAS), Fire Alarming System(FAS), etc. As with the improvement of automation in metro equipment engineering, the number of physical interfaces between sub-systems, the complexity of interface technology, the number of responsibility interfaces between different participants have increased dramatically. Traditional approaches for interface management (IM) such as interface communication meetings or interface related documents cannot adapt to modern automation level in metro equipment engineering any more. However, it remains quite common that the owners of metro projects are inexperienced in interface management and lack of standard IM approaches and effective IM tools. In order to improve the efficiency of IM and reduce the IM risks by minimizing the cost for interface conflicts and interface reworks, this paper comes up with an integrated interface model (IIM) which extracts interface information from scattered technical documents and then identifies, classifies and expresses the interface information again through structured and standardized format according to practical interface information requirement. Besides, the model proposes approaches to calculate the exact value of matching degree for technical interface and to track responsibility interface information during the whole construction stage. Based on IIM, the development and application of a web-based integrated interface management system (WIIMS) is presented in the study. The application of this system can provide technical guidance; information sharing and decision support for IM and further facilitates process control for the construction of metro equipment engineering.