Nederlandse Spoorwegen

In 2007 Dutch public transport moved to electronic tickets. NS Commercie, the part of NS, the Dutch national railway company, responsible for subscriptions and customer service, had to adapt its back-office systems to produce and process them, and to let customers view and change their own data.

Together with a team from NS Commercie and Atos Origin, I researched, designed and built a transaction-processing system based on web services and workflows, connected to the existing back-office systems. The system went live.

The processes behind a ticket were long-running, crossed several services and changed regularly. I designed and built a custom workflow engine with tooling to model and visualize them graphically. The diagrams gave the business and the developers a shared picture of each process, and showed how a workflow was actually implemented. Every action was programmed once and configurable with parameters, such as calling a service or sending an email, and in the diagram actions and decisions were chained together. When the process changed, tasks and decisions could be rearranged quickly. Other teams within NS later adopted the tooling and developed it further.

As a Software Developer and Application Architect, my responsibilities included:

• Designing the transaction-processing system on SOAP web services and workflows
• Designing and building the workflow engine, with configurable actions chained in graphical workflows
• Building Windows services for background processing and message queuing
• Coaching and advising the team