In the railway sector, maintaining the skills of machine personnel is not only a best practice but a mandatory regulatory requirement. A major rail transport company turned to us to completely digitize the skills management process through a modern testing platform.
Our customer, one of the main railway transport companies, needed a system for managing and maintaining skills of machine personnel. The challenge was to create a platform that would automate the monitoring of certifications and digitize the testing process. Machine personnel must demonstrate, by passing specific exams, that they have passed their skills in order to be qualified for railway traffic and vehicle management.
In rail transport, where safety is literally a matter of life and death, the choice of technology for mission-critical systems does not allow compromises. The framework offers essential features for the railway sector: native exception management with circuit breaker patterns to prevent cascades of errors, integrated health checks that allow you to constantly monitor the state of the system, and real-time performance metrics that are essential when managing the certifications of hundreds of machinists. In an environment where a down system means uncertified personnel and stopped trains, .NET Core guarantees the necessary resilience.
The most critical aspect was the transaction management. When a machinist completes an exam, the system must ensure that the result is recorded, the certification updated and the notifications sent, all atomically. .NET Core with Entity Framework Core has allowed us to implement Unit of Work and Repository patterns that ensure data integrity even in the event of partial failures. In addition, the native compatibility with Docker containers allowed us to deploy the system in high availability mode, with automatic failover in case of problems.
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We have developed a dedicated web portal that transforms the way in which the company manages the training and certification of its personnel.
The system is divided into two components. THEbackoffice area allows managers to manage the maintenance part of exams, configuring tests and monitoring deadlines. THEpersonal area has been designed for operational personnel, who can carry out tests when necessary through an intuitive and accessible interface.
A distinctive element of the platform is the integration of artificial intelligence for managing the repository of questions. The responsible staff manually manages the questions to be submitted to the tests, but the system incorporates a database of regulatory and technical documents used to extract questions from the various areas to be submitted to the exams. The implementation of AI makes it possible to automatically generate new questions starting from a specific topic contained in the reference documents, in addition to generating plausible incorrect answers starting from the correct one, thus ensuring variety and completeness in certification tests.
The platform was built with:
The choice of consolidated technologies guarantees long-term reliability and maintainability, crucial aspects for a mission-critical system in the railway sector.
The implementation of the portal has revolutionized skills management for the railway company. The main result was the centralized management maintenance exams for all employees, eliminating the risk of expired certifications and ensuring regulatory compliance through a fully digitized system.
The Modern Apps team responds swiftly to IT needs where software development is the core component, including solutions that integrate artificial intelligence. The technical staff is trained specifically in delivering software projects based on Microsoft technology stacks and has expertise in managing both agile and long-term projects.
