Replacement Availability and Reservations Service.

Descriptions

Rail Settlement Plan Limited (‘RSP’) is a company, owned by Train Operating Companies (‘TOCs’) franchised to operate train services in the United Kingdom. RSP provides and manages, on behalf of TOCs, a range of shared services for use by TOCs and accredited rail ticket retailers enabling provision of a GB wide rail ticket retail proposition. This is achieved by delivering the right information at the right time to the rail ticket retailer, and through capture of sales records for accurate and timely allocation and settlement of revenues. In order to sell and fulfil many types of rail ticket products, the rail ticketing systems used by retailers need real time access to availability data and the facility to book customer journeys. The service shall consist of the following underlying services: design, development and delivery of the application, application maintenance and support, service management, hosting and infrastructure management.RSP wishes to procure a new managed service for (the ‘Service’) as described in summary in this notice.The Service will be required to provide a repository for the storage and maintenance of all UK Train Operating Company (‘TOC’) physical inventory data, train schedule data, commercial yield strategies (Including the exchange of data with external toolsets) and its associated reference data. The Service will determine on a real time basis availability for all TOC bookable services on the basis of a dynamic application of inventory and yield strategies against bookable scheduled train services.Availability data will, initially, be made available, real time, to the 50-100 existing accredited retail systems by either an enhanced version of the existing request/response messaging service through web services and a new publish and subscribe facility of dynamic data exchange.The Service will be fully resilient, and be of a high availability (typically 99.99 %), transaction heavy nature with high performance 365/7 availability characteristic.There are currently around 20-30 million availability searches generated per day at a rate of up to 900 transactions per second. Daily bookings amount to around 350 000 per day. Annual growth of volumes is at around 10 % but unpredictable. The Look: Book ratio currently stands at 133:1.