Happy Journey!

An efficient railway system is of utmost importance for any country as it is
one of the key drivers for the overall economic health of the nation, especially
through the kind of services and facilities it offers. In a geographically vast
and diverse country like India, coupled with an exploding population, the
railways is the main mode of communication and transportation for the citizens
as well as goods. Further, it welds different parts of the country together with
its elaborate network spread across the length and breadth of the country. It is
also the key transportation medium for its armed forces, postal services, raw
materials, and other produce like coal, iron ore, petroleum, fertilizers,
cement, steel, and food grains as well as for business trips, travel, and
tourism. The railways is, therefore, instrumental in industrial development of
the country.

To support the ever-growing need for better transportationtypical to a
modern socio-economic conditionthe Indian Railways has implemented two
innovative enterprise-wide information systems that have been the turning point
for the railways. While Freight Operation Information System (FOIS) transformed
the way Indian freight trains operated, introduction of Passenger Reservation
System (PRS) revolutionized traveling by railways in India. The further
expansion of the online Passenger Reservation System through the implementation
of Country Wide Network for Computerized Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing
(CONCERT) has enabled anytime and anywhere ticketing possible for the Indian
commuters.

A Journey Made Easy

The Indian Railways Passenger Reservation System (PRS) has been one of the
landmark projects initiated by the Railway Ministry. If FOIS is the bloodline of
the Indian Railways, PRS is its lifeline. To have a more enhanced and effective
automated system in placeas far as ticketing and reservation is concernedthe
Railway Board went ahead with the introduction of Country Wide Network for
Computerized Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing (CONCERT). The online PRS and
CONCERT acts as a customer interface of providing reserved accommodation to
commuters of the Indian Railways.

The PRS is the first comprehensive information technology application that
was introduced by the in the year 1986. However, the system had its own
limitations. It was only in 1999, when CONCERT was implemented and enabled the
railways to have a fully integrated online ticketing and passenger reservation
system in place. This was a major initiative by that created history and made
anytime and anywhere ticketing for long distance traveling a reality in India.
Prior to that, people had to purchase tickets from separate counters in case the
boarding station was different from the purchase point of the ticket. For
example, if a passenger wanted to buy tickets for a journey from Kolkata to
Chennai, he/she can get it from a counter located at Kolkata. But to buy the
return ticket, wherein his boarding source would be Chennai, he had to go to a
separate counter and again stand in the queue to complete the transaction. The
second phase of PRS helped anywhere-to-anywhere ticketing a reality, and
subsequently enabled e-ticketing facility for passengers. The whole application
was integrated and connected through CONCERT in order to have a fully
integrating system in place. This anywhere-to-anywhere ticketing actually
revolutionized and changed the face of Indian Railways and passengers were
highly benefited and served in a better, efficient, and transparent manner.

It was in the early 90s that CRIS started working on the second version of
PRS. And the fully networked PRS application through CONCERT was completed in
1997. By 1999 the entire project was implemented across all major booking
counters in India. The application is based on five PRS server clusters placed
in New Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, and Secunderabad. It presently operates
from counters at 1,800 locations across the country.

Out of the total passengers carried by the railways, inter-city passengers
constitutes a mere 9% of the total volume. But, this small proportion, out of
the total, generates about 176 mn passengers out of a total of 341 mn passengers
who travel daily. This amounts to about 52% of the total. This segment also
bring in a revenue of Rs 42.9 bn in a total passenger revenue of Rs 60 bn,
constituting roughly 72% of the total. The seats/berths reservation system on
trains is a fairly complex activity. Its not only voluminous, involving more
than 600,000 seats/berths reservations per day, but also because of seven
different categories of trains operating, using seventy-two types of coaches
with seven classes of reservation, more than forty types of quotas and more than
eighty kinds of concessional tickets. The method of calculation of fare is also
quite complex as charges are based on the distance, comfort level provided in
each category of trains and coaches and the transit time. Because of this
complexity and sheer volume involved, the railways undertook the tedious job of
automating ticketing and reservation system through online system.

A pilot project consisting of a few popular trains was first implemented at
New Delhi in November 1985. Upon its success, the entire New Delhi reservation
system was computerized in May 1987. The standalone VAX computer systems were
further implemented at remaining three metropolitan citiesnamely, Mumbai (June
1987), Kolkata (July 1987) and Chennai (October 1987), and they account for over
40% of reservation volume. The last standalone cyber computer system was
implemented at Secunderabad in July 1989, which was subsequently replaced by VAX
computer system in January 95.

Many other stations having advance reservation arrangements were connected as
remote terminals to the existing five computer systems for accessing the entire
database of the host computer. To improve the service levels further and provide
better access of the system to customers, remote terminals from host computers
have also been provided at satellite locations in the metropolitan cities. In
some major cities, satellite terminals from five host computer systems were also
provided, thus allowing customers to access reservation databases. A teleprinter
interface to PRS called AUTOMEX, is also in place to enable those stations which
are not connected by remote terminals, to access the reservation database.

The inter-linking of the five host computers using networking software that
was made possible once CONCERT was introduced, and distributed transaction
processing has enabled access to databases in all the five host computers at any
terminal in the country. The entire system can therefore cover almost all
reservation quotas in the railways, with the databases distributed over five
computer locations, providing reservation access all over the country. CONCERT
was designed on a modern day technology platform, keeping in mind the
client-server architecture of the computer system to be flexible and scalable in
order to support future growth and business needs. Its message routing feature
for wide area network (WAN) implementation is achieved through RTR software and
Router hardware, connected directly to an Ethernet backbone. As a first phase of
CONCERT implementation, the two standalone PRS systems at Secunderabad and New
Delhi were replaced with the older version. Later on these network application
modules were subsequently extended to PRS at Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai.
CONCERT has also provided the multiple lap functionality resulting in better
customer service than before.

The new system also allowed the introduction of e-ticketing facility for
Indian Railways. PRS tickets can also be booked over Internet and mobile phones
via IRCTC web interface. Over 10 lakh passengers are served by PRS each day and
several lakh inquiries are made regarding reserved ticket status on CRIS
enquiry website on a typical day in the peak season. Information of ticket
status is also available through the IRCTC call centers at 139. The National
Train Enquiry System provides information on the time and schedule of trains.
This information is disseminated through Internet (www.trainenquiry.com) and is
available to agents at its call centers. The information is tapped directly from
the Control Office Automation system at fifty out of seventy-seven such offices.
A data warehouse has been developed for efficient and effective analysis of PRS
data by higher management.

Introduction of Internet and mobile ticketing facilities further eased the
passenger reservation system. These facilities are now being offered through
IRCTC, a subsidiary formed by the the Indian Railways. The entire system is a
joint effort by CRIS and IRCTC, wherein CRIS provides the back-end support and
IRCTC manages the front-end operationsnamely the web interface. Through this
system over 10 lakh passengers are served daily. Introduction of the the
railways call center (139 services) is another landmark project handled by IRCTC
in collaboration with CRIS. While CRIS provides the back-end support, IRCTC
maintains the call center activities.

Reserving the Unreserved

Introduced in 2002, the Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) has been designed
to offer a better traveling experience to local and short distance traveling
commuters. Generating over 49% of its earnings, the Indian Railways needed a
solution to centralize the purchase and management of unreserved tickets. The
UTS, a one-of-a-kind modern system, is a state-of-the-art computerized
unreserved ticketing mechanism that was developed and implemented by CRIS for
the Indian Railways. It provides tickets to over 1.5 crore passengers on a daily
basis, through counters at 2,500 locations across the country. In addition, 350
Automatic Ticket Vending machines (ATVMs) have been installed to ease out
booking counter loads. UTS is based on nine server clusters located at New
Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai (CSTM and Churchgate), Chennai, Secunderabad, Patna, and
Gorakhpur.

The award-winning solution created by CRIS handles 60% of the Indian
Railways total unreserved traffic today, yielding average revenue of about $4.7
mn daily. Passengers can immediately buy an unreserved return ticket for any of
the 8,520 trains that cover about 63,000 km track.

Employing cutting-edge Sybase technology, the UTS delivers non-stop ticketing
at remote locations, easy embedding of ticketing application to disk-on-chip and
eliminates the possibility of fraud. It is an extremely cost-effective solution
for regions with limited or poor connectivity, reduces passenger lines and
crowds at booking offices and stations, and improves the customer experience.
With UTS, the dramatic increase in railway traffic in recent years has been
accommodated effortlessly with no additional resources.

Before the UTS, unreserved tickets had to be purchased at the railway station
from which passengers were departing and were available for purchase only one
hour prior to departure. Unreserved passengers had little choice but to wait in
serpentine queues at congested stations to buy their tickets. This process gave
rise to considerable passenger discomfort, and at the same time posed a number
of operational and administrative problems for the Indian Railways including
system downtime, lost revenue, fraud, cumbersome reporting and accounting, and
high maintenance costs.

The conventional ticketing system used printed cards based on different
series of ticket stock classified by destination, time, class, and route. The
sale was carried out through staffed service counters with a long queue of
people waiting to buy tickets. These counters were destination and route
specific, so queues for popular destinations could not be allocated over a
number of counters, but were limited to a single, long line. Additionally,
monitoring of counter staff performance was difficult, as there were no means to
check opening times and hourly per clerk transactions. So instead of focusing on
the primary task of selling tickets effectively, a large amount of effort was
expended in back-end jobs like ticket inventory and distribution.

Rolling out the Solution

The entire countrywide system of the Indian Railways is distributed in nine
data centers with each data center encompassing a number of zones. The
Unix-based servers in each data center and station has deployed Sybase ASE,
Sybase Replication Server and leverages the high availability Sybase subsystems.
CRIS deployed Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) with the High Availability
(HA) option to provide database management capability at each of its area
servers, and SQL Anywhere mobile database for better information management at
the thin clients. The ASE HA sub-system is configured to ensure near-zero
downtime, and SQL Anywhere is a full- featured yet easily embeddable DBMS. The
UTS architecture has been designed with the approach of no single point of
failure. The consolidated database resides on an area server, connecting all
the stations within that zone while the remote database, SQL Anywhere, resides
on each individual thin client installed at various stations.

For example, suburban ticketing in a large city like Mumbai requires
up-to-the-second precision support to enable time-starved individuals to board
trains on time. Also, to reduce the queue length at the booking counters, a new
technology of ATVM has been introduced. These kiosks are embedded with Sybase
SQL Anywhere and along with the use of RFID smart cards, enable customers to buy
tickets through a user-friendly application supporting regional languages (in
addition to English and Hindi) facilitating the issuance of tickets without any
human interaction. The combined Sybase powered system enables always available
operations. This allows for ticketing operations to continue uninterrupted, even
if links to area servers are down, as well as provides database and
synchronization infrastructure in areas with extremely poor connectivity.

UTS is a complete solution providing computerized unreserved tickets to
railway passengers from dedicated counter terminals, automatic vending machines,
and other venues. UTS also incorporates additional functionalities like
cross-counter cancellation of tickets issued from any station, and advance
booking of unreserved tickets up to 3 days, neither of which were previously
possible. It also enables fare inquiries, ensures correct accounting of tickets
issued, and minimizes the possibility of manipulation and ticket misuse. In
addition to providing centralized system administration and software upgrades,
new terminals, users, location, routes, etc, can be easily added. Complemented
with a user-friendly interface, this new system eliminates high personnel
resource requirements, high-costs of printing, packing and stacking ticket
cards, and problems of defacing and forgery.

Piyali Guha

piyalig@cybermedia.co.in