DCA Toy Story Mania

Mouseketeer over at the Micechat.com forum's has posted some very interesting (and some pretty) pictures of the new DCA version of the rides I collectively call Toy Story Mania (despite the Midway in one, etc.).

ANYWHOO, the interesting picture to me as in enginerd is the last one which shows the visual part of the ride system operator's console.  You can see the pics here.

About half way down is a distance picture of the operator's station.  The controls look fairly normal for this type of attraction, and then to the immediate left is a flat panel display turned in portrait mode. 

One interesting by note here that I noticed in this and other pictures is that Disney and other ride operators seem to default to the more common sense format of 'green' means good, 'red' means bad.  Having worked in an industrial application for a while in college though (a coal fired power plant), I find it interesting since in those industries 'red' means engaged and operating and green means 'dis-engaged' or 'clear to approach'.  Maybe they use a mix of the two, but that would be even worse I would think.

But anyhow, you say, "okay, so it has a flat panel, so what?"  Well, if you look closely there are several things we can tell about the control system and possibly derive some even deeper information about how it's put together.

For instance, if you look at that kinda fuzzy in the details picture that shows the screen, you'll notice immediately that the computer pushing that display is running Windows XP.  We'll all hope that it's running and LEAST service pack 2 and if it's on a network outside the building hopefully it's on a segmented, non-Internet routable network.  Am I worried about Joey or Suzie surfing the web?  No, but you WOULD be worried about somebody hacking it or turning a virus loose on it.  The old systems in the other park rides are all mechanical and with closed loop, proprietary systems, or like in the case of early EPCOT where they were tied to the Sperry/Unisys computer systems in Communicore.  Now Disney's latest and greatest runs on. . . wait for it. . . . WINDOWS!

Closer to the bottom in the last two pictures there are lots of other geeky details just waiting to be seen.

For instance, the second from the bottom shows the header for the bottom window on that same LCD panel.  We don't get to see too much of it, but it:

• looks like a control log, tracking everything about the ride
• is suppose to be connected to another system called 'The Hub', but obviously wasn't (see 'Failed to connect to APEXHub.  (Ensure the hub is running).
• if you look at the tabs closely they are labeled 'all', 'RCS' (probably for Ride Control System), 'vcc' (which I presume is for the video control system) and 'game'

The last picture shows a closer picture of the upper part of the screen, which shows the RCS in diagram.  So what can we see from this?  Well, at 9 PM at night, the ride had dispatched 1397 cars, which if DCA opened at 9, means in 12 hours they did about 116.4 rides an hour.  If we do the math using the dispatch interval, 1397 dispatches at a 38 second average is 53,086 seconds, or 884.76 minutes, or 14.74 hours.  So it obviously starts counting when the ride is 'powered up' in the morning and not when the park day opens to guests. 

Of course, those calculations are assuming a uniform distribution of people at all hours of the day, which NEVER happens in a real environment like this. 

So I'll use the earlier number assuming that testing and maintenance dispatches are small and therefore negligible.  It also means the dispatch interval statistic really isn't much help, since it's just an average over times when the ride is running full tilt and also when it's hardly running at all.

I don't know what the throughput for the ride is, since Disney keeps that a secret, but at 8 riders a car, that means about 931.2 guests an hour enjoyed Toy Story Mania at DCA. 

That doesn't really tell us a whole lot, since I made a few possibly wrong assumptions like that the ride was open to guests all day, which it might not have been, thereby making the number of rides an hour more.  That number seems maybe a little low, but it's also a new ride. That means about 11,175 guests for the day.

Just a couple of other points to add to this however.  It appears that 19 vehicles were in motion in the ride, and we can see that 2 were tagged out:  one for the ADA loading ramp (in purple) and one for maintenance (in grey) which is probably the backup vehicle for the day if they keep one offline.  I count 22 total vehicles however, so the one in the loading area maybe doesn't count?

The ride shows a co-mingled track, with one main track in the loading area that splits into two, probably identical tracks in the back, the A and B track, which re-converge after scene 7X2 (scene 7 has two screens each for both track A and B).  All of the scenes in the ride when this picture was taken were in 'use' by a ride vehicle, so the ride was a least full (so at any point in time it appears that 15 vehicles or 60 people are really in the ride at any one point in time).  It also appears that the people loading and unloading from the ADA access area do not see the final scene entitles 'WAV'.

The ride monitor at the top doesn't tell us too much, since the dates in the log are all prior to the current date.  One good note here however is that the system does appear to be using a private, non-routable address space (note the 192.168.X.X address), so if it's connected outside, at least it's presumably through a firewall and at LEAST through a router running NAT (that's a good thing for you non-techie types).  It also shows that Rack 0, Slot 2 is online, which means the systems used throughout the ride are a modular planed system of some sort, probably what is called a 'programmable logic controller' or PLC, which is typical in industrial style applications and very reliable.  PLC systems have been in use for a long time and have a very good track record.

Lastly, we can just make out the title for this window, which is 'SIMATIC WINCC Flexible Runtime'.  I'd never heard of SIMATIC, but a quick Google finds that, guess what, it is software from an industrial automation system sold by. . . click here.  That means the whole track system is probably wired with sensors from the same company.  I like reading this type of stuff, but you guys might find it kind of boring.  ;)

Which I guess should not be a surprise, given the recent sponsorship changes in Flordia for a heavyweight EPCOT attraction.  Maybe they upgraded the control system for it during the recent refurb?

I wonder if they got a good deal?

UPDATE:  It also appears from what I can tell that that display is in fact the total computer, probably a model 477B.

UPDATE 2:  BTW, I base my 8 people per on the following picture from Florida:

http://www.disunplugged.com/2008/05/10/pictures-toy-story-mania/

Look at the 9th picture down, it shows a large 'advertisement' for the ride vehicle and states:'2-8 players'.  Technically you can get twelve in the car, but there are only 8 guns per total vehicle, so if you put in 12, 4 people would only get to watch.