GE Transportation Systems Selects RT-LAB Engineering Simulators to Develop New Auxiliary Power Controllers for Locomotives

Opal-RT Technologies Inc. (www.opal-rt.com), the world leader in distributed real-time simulation on PC-based platforms, today announced that General Electric Transportation Systems (GETS), after a very successful initial project with their first RT-LAB Engineering Simulator, has added five more systems to help develop new auxiliary power controllers on their locomotives.

The Auxiliary Panel upgrade team at GETS first purchased RT-LAB a year ago for rapid control prototyping and panel hardware/software integration testing at the component level. As the project progressed, the team wanted to leverage the technology in to their hardware-in-the-loop system simulator for automated regression and system anomaly testing.

With the distributed computational power of RT-LAB, the team will be able to achieve the real-time fidelity needed, and its open architecture allows them to readily integrate the technology into their own real-time systems.

"We chose RT-LAB because of its open architecture, its ability to reuse existing components, and that it has been proven to reduce our time to market." said Donald Mackellar, Senior Lead Software Engineer, Controls and Software Systems, GETS, "RT-LAB reduced our engineering hours by allowing us to reuse, not re-invent".

For this phase in the project, GETS has purchased five RT-LAB Engineering Simulators. They anticipate investing in a further five systems for the next phase, slated for January 2004.