Top 5 IT projects of Indian Railways

When we hear our government bodies trying to fuse technology in its operations; it seems as if the country is put in fool's paradise.

But, when Indian Railways(IR) recently launched RailRadar, an online application where one can find the exact geographical location of about 6,500 trains on a Google map on real time basis; the whole country stood up in amazement. So, it would be mean if we conclude by ignoring certain very logical, important and advanced projects taken up by Indian railways with the help of ‘Centre for Railway Information Service (CRIS)' in last few years.

And what more; many of us letting the grass grow under our feet; Indian railways has already implemented many such projects and they are up and running in their initial phases and some are maturing with time.

RailRadar was one of their new and key innovations. The service is running in beta at railradar.trainenquiry.com, and it is currently programmed to track 6,500 of the total 10,000 trains operated by the Indian Railways. Rail Radar gives information about a train's arrival at the various stops on its route, and displays its location on the country's map.

The RailRadar system works on a series on 6,000 monitoring stations that update the server with time of a train's arrival in its zone. The system has been designed to refresh information every five minutes.

Let's look at some of the key IT projects taken up by CRIS for Indian Railways and see how advanced our country's railway systems and management aspires to be:

1. Unreserved Ticketing System(UTS)

Though UTS was launched and implemented years ago; today Indian railways under UTS expansion project is setting the systems up to more and more locations across the country.
Today UTS is at 5512 locations; 62.40 Crore passengers booked, earning Rs. 1088.12 crore in previous month.

UTS is providing centrally administered computerized ticketing system over Indian Railways. The application has been developed with a 3 layered architecture in C++. Currently the hardware is deployed across 8 data centres. To cater to the expansion of the user base for this application, the existing setup is being migrated to a high-end virtualized setup.

This is the first time that Visualization has been implemented for an IR application. The back end setup has a provision to support Business Continuity ensuring a nearly 100% uptime for the application. Besides this at the client end the so called ‘Smart Clients' have been deployed which are basically thin clients with a footprint of RDBMS and application image.

Passenger Reservation Systems (PRS)

PRS provides reservation services to nearly 1.5 to 2.2 million passengers a day on over 2500 trains running throughout the country. The PRS Application CONCERT (Country-wide Network of Computerized Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing) is the world's largest online reservation application, developed and maintained by CRIS. The system currently operates from 5 Data centers.

The server clusters are connected together by a core network that enables universal terminals across country, through which the traveling public can reserve a berth on any train, between any pair of station for any date and class.The system earned 2201.92 crore in previous month.

Under ‘Enhanced E-ticketing' project of PRS; tender documents for equipment procurement has been handed over to IRCTC whereas e-ticketing application for individual users is under testing.

SaTSaNG - software aided train scheduling

The Software Aided Train Scheduling and Network Governance (SATSaNG) project is building a tool for efficient allocations and robust time tables.
The SATSaNG application is being developed in house, using Microsoft technologies like Microsoft Visual Studio C# for development, Microsoft Expression Blend for designing Interfaces, WPF framework for Rich Graphical Interface and MVVM for design patterns. Oracle 11G provides the backbone for the centralized database.

This application is being designed based on a three layered architecture. Terminal servers will be used to host application centrally. All the servers will reside in CRIS data centre in high availability mode.

Track Management System (TMS)

Implementation of Track Management System on balance divisions of IR has been planned. Close to Rs.39.67 cores has been sanctioned by Rly. Bd. for implementation of TMS on IR. System successfully implemented in 25 divisions out of 68 divisions of IR as if now.

Human Resource Management System (HRMS)-

There is plan to approved for the implementation of the ERP based system for managing human resource department in North Western Railway.

Also, few more to lord over

Disaster Recovery Data Centre

Tender is likely to be opened as soon as vendors queries are addressed for disaster recovery data center. RFID for Automatic Identification of Railway Wagons is being planned.

Radio Frequency Identification technology is being planned to use to identify railway wagons. Tender for AMC of RFID locations has been opened this month.