Case Study: Indra Sistemas modernizes Spain’s AVE high-speed rail control with Actian’s Versant db4o

Indra pioneers the use of db4o as a mission-critical, fail-proof, real-time object database

Indra Sistemas, a leading Spanish technology and defense company, was selected to build the control centers for Spain’s AVE high-speed rail network and needed a real-time train control system (IRC) capable of handling a very complex object model—over 30,000 in-memory objects across 30 classes—with eventual corporate data flows of some 80 TB. The challenge was to support extreme speed, a minimal footprint, zero maintenance, and true object-oriented design without costly data transformation.

Indra adopted the Versant db4o object database, which runs natively in Java, enabled object querying, and processed hundreds of thousands of objects per second while requiring no administration. The result was a single systemwide data model that delivered centralized monitoring, tracking and problem resolution, high performance and scalability as AVE expands, and allowed developers to focus on the control-system design rather than data-storage issues.

Indra Sistemas

José Miguel Rubio Sánchez

IRC Technical Manager