Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Railway system
TanmoyDuari, WS-2014-15 ESB Business School,
Hochschule Reutlingen , Germany
Introduction
Indian Railways (IR)) is the principal mode of transport in the country. It is one of
the worlds largest rail networks under a single management . and is the
principal mode of transport in the country.,Initially started in 1848,, with a
single rail link between the cities of Mumbai and Thane, IR has now grown
into a massive network of 115,000 km of track covering a route of
65,436 km (40,660 mi) and 7,172 stations. In 201314, IR carried (a
whopping) 8,425 million passengers (or more than 23 million passengers
daily) and 1050.18 million tons of freight .(1)
Modernization
Being a government owned organization, the modernization and
implementation of new IdeasinofIR has always taken considerable time and
effort , especially when weaning away the employees, workers and users
from (then) existing manual or mechanical systems. But by the 1970s the
benefits of modern electrical and electronic technology could no longer be
ignored and IR ittheir slowly started adopting these modern practices. In
the early 1990s, tThe Indian economy underwent economic reforms leading
to increased international integration and globalization, with it, also came
the Information technology and telecommunication revolution.
In the meantime, it also became essential for the IR to find, and use new
and more effective tools to manage the pressures of maintaining their
infrastructure, assets and functioning , placed on it by an ever growing
population. For this, the Centre for Railway Information system (CRIS)
was setup as collaboration between IT specialists and railway experts, on
deputation from the Indian Railways.
CRIS designs, develops, implements and maintains most of the important
Information systems for the IR. While they have implemented several
important projects over the years (including Freight Operations
Information System, crew management system, Control office application,
e-procurement system, etc.), one of their most important and most visible
solutions has been thePassenger Reservation System(PRS) and the online
Introduction of IT
The computerization of the Reservation system beganin 1985with a pilot
project for the computerized Passenger reservation system (PRS) was
launched in New Delhi and few other cities, this soon developed into a
network of railway reservation centers in all major cities across the
country.(3)They were client stations connected to the main reservation
servers via their own dedicated data lines , VSAT or the then existing
analogue telephone networks. People could walk into any one of these
reservation centers , fill out a form and pay at a counter to get the tickets
from any source to any destination . But the queues were extremely long
and frustrating , and still this system was slow and susceptible to
malpractices, as the availability checking and booking of the ticket was
done by the computer operators at the booking terminal.
Further Improvements
References
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Railways
(2) http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-procedure-of-railway-reservation-systemin-early-80s
(3) http://borjournals.com/Research_papers/Jun_2013/1356IT.pdf
(4) https://www.railelectrica.com/indian-railways/how-information-technology-isgoing-to-impact-indian-railways/