Research And Design Of Communication Middleware On AFC System

With the acceleration of urbanization process and the explosion of urban population, pressure on urban transport becomes more and more intense. Many big cities in China are trying to solve this problem through investments of a great deal of human, material and financial resources in the construction of urban rail transit system, so the intelligence and information technology development of urban rail transit has a great potential; AFC (Automatic Fare Collection) system acting as an important part of intelligent rail transportation equipment and its information construction has always been given priority. Middleware, as a cutting-edge software application technology, in a variety of software systems has a lot of advantages such as a high integration, a high reusability, and a better application development efficiency. Through studying the middleware, the communication middleware in particular, this paper describes the development system which can improve AFC system's software reliability, lower development costs and shorten development cycle with its help.According to the principles of commonality and easy-maintainability, a message based communication middleware is designed, while taking advantages of C++ and Socket technologies, a communication pattern of unified interface for different systems and applications is designed. The communication middleware can shield the network connection and thus it is needless to consider the communication details. In practical implementation, several techniques are used to improve the performance: the multi-thread technology for simultaneous communication to improve the data transmission efficiency as to reduce the occupancy rate of CPU; the real-time channel for emergence messages as to reduce the delay; the priority control and data buffer for all messages as to give priority to higher priority message in polling message sequence; encryption procedure of data transmission as to guarantee the security.The research shows that the application of communication middleware can simplify the development of AFC system, improve the development efficiency of application software and enable the developers to give a higher focus on the specific business.