The ASFINAG group is responsible for the planning, construction, operation, and toll collection of the entire Austrian highway and expressway network. ASFINAG is a customer-financed highway operator and provides its customers a well-developed and safe road network with high availability and good customer service.
More than 2,000 sensors along the Austrian highway and expressway network provide for increased road safety. They collect all traffic-relevant data. The harmonization of the traffic is achieved by evaluating the sensor data. Due to the real time evaluation, changes can be catered for much faster and necessary action can be taken, if necessary. It has been proven that in this way, accidents are successfully minimized.
Project Execution
ASFINAG Maut Service GmbH, a subsidiary of ASFINAG Holding, has been using SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence for performing data analyses since 2003. With a data volume of meanwhile one terabyte, and a monthly growth of 20 gigabytes, the response times of the SAP system in the area of mass data sank considerably.
ASFINAG searched for a solution to this problem and decided on the nearline storage solution of PBS Software GmbH. This SAP-certified solution that was designed especially for the SAP Business Warehouse, docks onto the nearline storage interface in the SAP BW system and transfers the data into the column-based – and therefore extremely fast – Sybase IQ database.
At ASFINAG, this resulted in a reduction in the length of response times by an average of 50 percent. ASFINAG is extremely satisfied with this success. It was achieved within a project that took only three days and in which simply a database consultant and a PBS employee were involved in addition to two ASFINAG employees.
Summary
By using the PBS nearline storage solution, the analysis speed was increased fourfold. Reporting can be performed on an ad hoc basis and analysis criteria do not have to be defined in advance. Information that previously could only be put together using time-consuming and expensive procedures is now available in the shortest possible time.
