Cross-border Organisation & User Requirements for Information Exchange Review

The TIH is an open and interoperable framework that enables the exchange of information between travel network operators and information service suppliers. The TIH is being developed for the HA by the Transport Research Laboratory and the Intelligent Computer Systems Centre of the University of the West of England, Bristol. It will enable the exchange of real-time information between network operators and service providers with the objectives of co-ordinating network operating strategies and providing high quality information to the travelling public. Figure 6 presents a diagrammatic representation of the TIH.

The TIH architecture is derived from the object management architecture developed by the Object Management Group (OMG). This is based on the use of object request brokers (ORBs) to handle client requests for service, which is facilitated through the use of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). A service on the TIH is characterised by its interface, which is written using the CORBA Interface Definition Language (IDL). The interface conceals the implementation details of the service from the client. Hence services can be implemented on any hardware platform with available ORB implementation. This approach is particularly suited to allowing legacy systems to work seamlessly with new applications, independent of the systems they run on and the languages used to implement them.

More information regarding the TIH can be found on the website http://www.tih.org.uk.