Network Rail rolls out GSDR

Graffica Scheme Diagram Reader establishes it’s place on the Network Rail product catalogue with the first group of the target 40-60 users activating licenses. The days of totally manually transferring information from scheme diagrams may be nearing an end for NR and the wider rail industry.

The tool is capable of reading scheme diagram documents (in PDF format) to a high degree of accuracy. The extracted data is displayed along with and linked to the scheme diagram drawing. This allows the user to explore the results in an intuitive way to verify the accuracy of the parsing process. From the results the user can export directly to simulator file formats such as RSL or produce intermediate formats such as VCN compatible tables where no direct integration exists. There is also the capability to simply export the entire data to a tab delimited Excel file for further generic processing.

The tool is flexible to use allowing selection of area(s) to read or exclude from reading, selection of the colours to process and the meaning to associate with those colours (typically black indicates unchanged features, red are added features and green are removed features – but other colours and other interpretations can be applied). The model updates performed by the tool can be configured to create a new model, replace an area of a model or perform add and remove updates to an existing model.