Troubleshooting the Santo Domingo metro

We were approached in 2009 by THALES to audit and troubleshoot the Ethernet Hirschmann network of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) metro before opening to public.

Santo Domingo is the capital of the Dominican Republic and its new metro has been inaugurated end of 2008. It’s the republic’s first metro line and provides a vital north-south rail link through the city.

The new line with its 16 stations is 14 kilometers long and link the north and the south parts of the city. It is the first stage in a major upgrade of the island’s transportation systems designed to meet the growing needs of the capital’s three million residents for mass transit infrastruture.

Siemens and Thales supply the fixed trackside equipment for the new line. Thales supplies the supervision systems comprising station control and the operations control centers, telecommunications and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), access control and contactless fare collection.

Initially for a network audit of the 16 metro stations, half on surface, half underground, the mission has been completed by the writing of the network maintenance document and the training of a local maintenance technician.

The architecture of this network was massively routed using OSPF for unicast and DVMRP for multicasts traffic (CCTV and audio communication between trains and control staffs). It includes railway signaling, ticketing, gates access, communications of ticket offices, ….