The Station of the Future: Providing an integrated passenger and consumer experience

Working with Network Rail, the project will deliver 21st Century station facilities, responding in a unified manner to the connectivity demands of four functional groups: security providers, operators, retailers and travellers. It will converge discrete, separate communications and mobile subsystems in a station to create a single, IP infrastructure to develop and test a holistic architecture called Stations as a Service (StaaS). StaaS empowers a step change, and provides an open archiecture needed to unlock future investment and innovation in the UK Rail Sector. StaaS delivering benefits from convergence of various systems & technologies: building management, Internet of Things and Big Data. It enables operators to move from closed systems & networks which have impacted the rail sector negatively to a co-operative shared structure. It creates a new management & commercial model for future stations and provides a blueprint to improve customer experience as data & its value becomes visible and exploitable. StaaS will support innovation in the four main stakeholder functions: security, real-time operations, commercial estate and passenger service innovation. The project will develop a StaaS architecture based on clear user-scenarios. The involvement formally of Abellio and the self-financing observer status of Network Rail and Scotrail provides the window of opportunity to develop and demo StaaS eco-systems. The project will be open and allow other UK SMEs to innovate on the StaaS platform ensuring the reference architecture is extensible.