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PDMS play a role in the Isle of Man’s famous TT Races

The Isle of Man’s famous TT motorbike races attracts thousands of visitors to the Island every year, and this year PDMS have developed software to help track the competitors as they ride around the 37.73 mile course. The project, known as ‘RaceMann’, has been sponsored by the Department of Tourism and Leisure who needed to replace legacy software with more resilient, higher performance and better integrated systems to track, display and record race information.

PDMS have developed new modules to interface with AMB’s (one of the world’s leading providers of race timing and scoring software systems) race control software. Transponder detector loops are installed in the road at several locations around the TT circuit. These are synchronized by GPS and connected to the race control tower located at the start-finish in Douglas by ISDN lines - as much as 10 miles away! And unlike short circuit racing, for which the AMB systems were designed, the TT is a time trial - riders set off at 10 second intervals. The PDMS RaceMann system takes the data provided to it by the AMB system and "interprets" it appropriately for the TT. A variety of tracking displays are available, tailored to the needs of specific race controllers during both Practice and Race sessions.

Alongside the Tracking system, PDMS have also developed integrated Retirements and Event Log systems. These allow information about events which affect the running of a Practice or Race, such as the Island's notoriously fickle weather, and information about competitors' stopping around the circuit, due to mechanical failure to be entered with ease and be widely presentable.

PDMS have developed the RaceMann system using their "standard" approach to business system development. The data is stored in a SQL-Server database and presented via web-servers using components based on Foundations TM. Information is passed to the client applications in XML format and displayed using .Net, HTML, XSL and CSS technologies.

Needless to say, resilience of the system is crucial. Data is replicated between a pair of SQL Server database servers, and the RaceMann system contains automatic failover routines. Load balancing technology is used on the web-servers.

The new RaceMann system has played a large part in the success of this year’s TT races and there are plans to further enhance it ahead of the TT centenary year in 2007.

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