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.