Passenger Reservation System of Indian Railways

Information System in Indian Railways By: Amit Shankar Choudhary

Agenda • • • • • • •

Introduction Brief history Indian railways present perspective Information system of Indian railways Railway reservation system Benefits Conclusion

Introduction Q. What is information system? An information system can be any organized combination of people, hardware, software, communication networks and data resources that store and retrieves, transform and disseminates information in an organization. Information system plays pivotal role in organizations, management and competitive advantages.

Brief History • Railways were first introduced to India in 1853 • By 1947, there were 42 railway systems. In 1951 the system were nationalized as one unit • In 1986, the Ministry of Railways established the “Centre of Railway Information System (CRIS)” • In 1990, CRIS introduced CONCERT (Country wide Network for Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing)

Current Scenario • Indian railways is 2nd largest railways with 7025 stations, 63273 Km of track and strength of 1.40 millions employee. • It carries some 6.53 billion passengers and 804.11 millions MT freight every year. • Out of the 11 million passengers who climb one of 8520 trains each day about 5,50,000 are reserved accommodation. • 16 railway zone (excluding Konkan Railways) managing whole Indian Railways. • Service availability 24X7.

Services to the passengers using IS • • • • • • • • • •

Passenger reservation system solution. Unreserved ticketing system. Mobile ticketing. Web ticketing. Kiosk based ticketing. Centralized (hybrid) ticketing system. Time table and scheduling system. Traffic management system. Passenger information display system. Web base service: www.indianrail.gov.in

IS in Indian Railways • A leading edge reservation system powered by HP Alpha ServerTM system running on HP OpenVMS TM operating system and HP reliable transaction router (RTR) middleware. • Integrated information system along with RFID technology. • An enterprise payment gateway. • BI and data warehousing for passenger reservation system, FOIS and unreserved ticketing system. • Disaster recovery for business critical system- FOIS (Freight Operation IS), PRS (Passenger reservation system), UTS (Unreserved Ticketing system) and COIS (Coaching Operation IS).

Main Challenges of Indian Railways • Provide a reservation system that can efficiently serve more than half a million people each day. • Ensure maximum uptime so reservation/ticketing/inquiry application available 24X7. • Create a website that can accommodate more than a million hits per day.

Reservation System • Indian railway reservation is based on OLTP (online transaction processing) • Current software is CONCERT. It is built around a RDBMS core and supports a full client server architecture. • The application is design as an open distribution system, so that the data and transaction volume can be segregated between multiple host sites. • Software confirms to open standard, hence it can be interface with other application like airline reservation and hotel reservation system etc. • CONCERT software is parametric in terms of data and business rule, for fare compulsion, refund rule etc.

Database Structure of PRS

PRS enquiry system • Indian railway website, www.indianrail.gov.in offers PRS enquiry on the internet Berth/Seat availability, passenger status, fare, train schedule etc. • A maximum of 4.2 million hits per day have been recorded. • National Train Enquiry System (NTES) website www.trainenquiry.com gives dynamic information about the running status of any train and its expected arrival/departure at any given station.

Cont…. • Mobile phone based SMS enquiry system. • A new mobile phone based facility for rail users viz. train delay alert service. • Country wide extension of universal railway enquiry number 139 • Interactive voice response system (IVRS)

Security Perspective • Application is secured against intrusion by two level user authentication as the top most guard. • Below it, the data is secured from external access through multiple level privileges. • A data encryption facility is available across the WAN to prevent hacking.

Benefits of IT • Issue of reservation ticket from any station to any station. • Reservation services can offer round the clock. • Change of train profile can be possible effectively and immediately. • Dynamic definition of the advance reservation is possible. • Provide the online aggregation of EIS figure such as revenue, berth utilization etc. and presentation of summarized data in the form of visual analytics from the operational system's information store.

Cont… • Provides automatic database recovery against all kinds of hardware and software failures. • Complete audit trails for transactions and data access.