Red Hat (News - Alert) and PTC communications systems provider Meteorcomm have announced their collaboration to deploy Meteorcomm's Interoperable Positive Train Control (PTC) communications solution with Red Hat JBoss messaging technologies and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the railroad industry.

To support the North American PTC program that will cover most of the U.S. rail network and enable all PTC-equipped trains to detect and react to unsafe conditions in real time, Meteorcomm began work on a solution that would enable interoperability across both system architectures and operating platforms, according to a joint statement by the companies. Needing a flexible solution that was also adaptable, Meteorcomm partnered with Red Hat.

The professional services required to support the deployment of PTC systems include Interoperable Train Control Communications (ITCC) design and deployment, and require high availability, interoperability, mobility and the ability to support a large network of remote and back office communications.

The railroad industry had been working on its own solution, but leveraging existing solutions helped the project continue to advance.

"The railroads did a tremendous amount of work developing their own messaging protocol," explained James Kirkland, principal enterprise architect for Red Hat. "Faced with the aggressive timeline and the new technologies required for the protocol, they began considering alternatives. Red Hat worked with Meteorcomm to leverage an open, standard, wire-level messaging protocol that became the messaging component of the PTC communications system."

Red Hat JBoss is built on an open, wire-level messaging protocol designed for maximum interoperability and complex networked systems with mobile endpoints. With JBoss, the railways can communicate and send messages to each other via the protocol, and it maps easily with application-level APIs.

The technical expertise from Red Hat was crucial for the implementation during the design and configuration of a back office, according to the statement.

"In a highly-distributed mobile environment like this, interoperable communications are what transform a collection of servers, relays and devices into an intelligent system," said Craig Muzilla, vice president of middleware for Red Hat. "As a Red Hat Embedded partner, Meteorcomm was able to seamlessly implement their ITC Messaging System while offering superior support services to their customers, serving as a true indication of where the market is headed.”

Those interested in learning more about how Red Hat can support their business should consider attending an upcoming webinar sponsored by TMCnet and Red Hat. The free webinar looks at the open source cloud platform, OpenStack, and Red Hat’s cloud infrastructure. Gary Chen will be giving the talk, IDC (News - Alert) research manager for enterprise virtualization software.

The webinar takes place Tuesday, Oct. 1 at 11 a.m. EST. Those interested in attending can register here.