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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.
| We follow a delivery model that is
completely focused on the customer Madhav Pathak, MD, CRIS |
Please elaborate the role played by
CRIS in the Indian Railways?
CRIS was established in 1986 as an autonomous society under the Ministry of
Railways. It was established to design, develop, and implement the Freight
Operations Information Systems (FOIS). Over the years, many other
applications were facilitated by CRIS. The IT systems under the ambit of
CRIS include ticketing and passenger service systems, operations management
systems, asset management systems, and resource management systems. While
some of the ticketing and operations systems are older, where the focus was
on maintenance and enhancement; asset and resource management systems are
new areas under development. With its unique combination of domain knowledge
experts from the rail industry and technical personnel, it helps in the
conception of projects, provides advice on financial implications, apart
from designing, developing, and deploying the IT applications. Considering
the fact that CRIS has more than twenty applications at different stages of
development, it plays a pivotal role within the Indian Railways IT
strategy.
What is the modus operandi for CRIS? Also tell us about its project
delivery model and project management.
The organization comprises railway employees who are on deputation, and
employees of CRIS who are largely software and network professionals.
Together they form a team bringing domain knowledge and technical expertise
on the same side of the table. This allows CRIS to follow a delivery model
that is completely focused on the customer. Hence, CRIS works in close
tandem with the user in designing and delivering its projects. As far as
execution of projects is concerned, there are basically two modelsin-house
projects and outsourced projects. Again, the guiding principle in the
delivery model and project management is to help the railways meet its
targets. The continued involvement of CRIS with the Indian Railways
throughout the lifecycle of the project ensures that all solutions are
sustainable and scalable.
What is the roadmap for IT application in the Indian Railways?
One of the key challenges for us is the integration across applications.
Applications were developed based on the departmental style of working in
the railways. This has the advantage of a clear ownership for the
application and ensures smoother implementation. Currently, the attempt is
to take advantage of all the possible synergies across these applications.
For this purpose we have a specialized team to work on integration issues.
The other key direction in which we are moving is towards consolidation of
our resources, thus creating more with what we have. The third major
initiative is to bring in new technology in order to provide better services
to the customer. This could be anything ranging from GPS based data captures
to GPRS based connectivity, leading to easy access to services and more
accurate information for all.
Piyali Guha
piyalig@cybermedia.co.in |
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 Page(s) 1 2
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