What started as a non-profit freight operations information system is now Indian Railways' IT arm, having provided solutions from freight receipts to wagon movement and e-procurement – all pressure points for the user. R Badri Narayan explains how CRIS is poised to change it all.
Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) operates under the verticals of business, operaÂtions, assÂets, planning, resources and vigilance. ERP applications including e-tendering, communicaÂtion network moniÂtoring and track maintenance are in place.
Tracking and transparency
For all freight wagons that are hired to take shipment from point A to point B, CRIS has a tracking system in place. (Parcel systems are still in the initial stages.) Like passenger ticketing, freight receipts are generated by CRIS.
Like the movement of trains, coaches and wagons need to be tracked and thereby gain a sense of every movement, captured in a database. This is what CRIS's operations applications do. There is a controlled office application which tracks movement of every train. Voice communication between station master and controller is required by the Railway Act, so much of the control is still manual. Information is now plotted on a computer-generated graph. The software can then provide suggÂestions as to how to plan better.
While there is the availability of crew communication, a policy decision needs to be taken on it. They are all provided cell phones, but that raises safety questions because it could be a distraction. There is an ongoing debate as to what kind of communication should be permissible to the driver and assistant driver.
Our Rake Allocation System application allots emÂpty rakes to the customers, but it could work well if freiÂght trains were scheduled. Currently, because freight trains are not scheduled, predicting the arrival of wagons becomes unreliable. We are now building an application that will make suggestions, based, among other paraÂmeters, what the commodity is. Soon it will become mandatory to apply that suggestion. This minimises local discretion, and the customer has an access to the suggestion online. If, on the basis of entry stock, he feels there is something wrong with it, he can lodge a protest.
That said, it is difficult for the computer to optimise dynamically and develop a rich model where it is able to figure the various implications of every decision and suggest the best from an operations prospective. This kind of applications have begun only last year and not the entire network is currently covered. Discretion can only be minimised once the Railways have covered 100 per cent of transactions then the need for such decision support and then you are able to rely on such computerised decision making.
Procurement
Procurement is now electronically done, and bidÂders can easily know the rates quoted by the other competitors. Because of commercial implications, this facility is avaÂilable to bidders alone, and not to the general public. RTI does not cover some of the government's commÂercial activity.
Maintenance and scheduling
There is an application that will tell you about when was the track expected, when was it last treated, when was it last replaced, therefore when should it be and therefore the moment you have an accident, post the accident post mortem analysis is easier. You can say when it was last inspected by the person who was supÂposed to inspect it for safety, what did he do at that time and hence it will help you to find the cause.
Although we have not yet developed it as an appÂlication yet, we can show on a map where the trains are moving, drill down to the train and tell which train it is; if it is a freight train, what commodity is in it, who the shipper is, and where it is going, even indicate the weiÂght on each of the wagons.
User interface
For this track and trace, there is a website where a user can enter the receipt number and you can track the shipment. Soon a user just send an SMS to a given number and get to know where the freight is. Except for a small percentage of freight-bananas from Bhusaval in Maharashtra-all freight transactions are now electroÂnically done and receipts are generated from the application. Sixty per cent of freight payment is already through e-payment. This breaks a world monopoly by a very small coterie of players. We are engaged with a Spanish firm for the manufacturing for gates and part of the applications as well.
Outside typical freight offices, we would earlier find a large number of middlemen trying to find out, leading to unethical practices were common because information was valuable and some people held the information and played around with it. Because all information is now online, these touts have disappeared from those sites.
On the operations side, all controlled movements are captured through the control office applications. Operations take place in control offices through which we control movement of trains and yards, incÂluding loading-unloading, maintenance and crew changeovers. Control office controls movement of runÂning trains acrÂoss stations, and station masters conÂtact the control office.
Safety devices-for the future
Going forward, we need intelligent devices that can warn drivers and switch to automatic or communicate if wrong decisions are made, a track gets damaged, a signal gets damaged. We have not yet reached that stage. The Anti-Collision Device (ACD) is a Konkan Railway solution, whereby two trains are able to talk to each other and figure out if they are on the same track and thus avoid possible collision. ACD is still in a pilot stage, and hasn't been certified as perfectly safe. The Railway Board has recently assigned CRIS the task of working in this area. Placing a device is not difficult, but making the device work at all times is the difficult part, because it means ensuring that that mode of communication does not fail.
Therefore, the questions before we can go ahead with this kind of a solution are: Can satellite comÂmunication be relied upon and timely enough? Is the market sufficiently large that we can get into contracts and not get locked in with one vendor? A part of the hesitancy also stems from software ownership dilemmas. There is no clear directive yet and it is a premature thing to talk about where it is heading.
The Ministry of Railways is keen that CRIS should look at satellite based communication is to be used and to be preferred over terrestrial communication because terrestrial communication requires landside recruitment that can be tampered with. Another problem in our couÂntry is non-standardisation of signalling systems.
Capacity planning
There are different methods to calculate capacity and it is a big debate because we calculate capacity on a piece of network. That piece could have if it is all double line then it is simple, if it is single line it is simple, but if it is part single line and part double line then it is difficult. Sometimes trains run on 120 per cent utilisation of track. That means increased transit times for unscÂhedÂuled trains because they will have to wait and go. More capacity utilisation means more transit times for unschÂeduled trains. Further, Human Resources and Financial ManageÂment are areas that we have just begun.
The author is General Manager (Strategic Planning and Innovation), Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), the New Delhi-based infotech arm of Indian Railways.
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