Indian Railways Gets Freight Operation Information System

Railways are the lifeline of India. As the principal constituent of the nation’s transport system, the Indian Railways owns 228,170 wagons, 45,806 different types of coaches and 7,817 locomotives. On an average, the railways moves over 1.65 million tonnes of freight and 15 million passengers use railways per day, covering 7,031 stations.

This makes Indian Railways the largest railway network in Asia and the second largest in the world under a single management. In order to continue receiving a fair share in the freight revenue, Indian Railways has implemented Freight Operation Information System (FOIS), a scalable freight operations management system that has been built on BEA Tuxedo (TP monitor) and BEA WebLogic Server to extend the core applications to the Web.

Problems in tracking and managing rakes

One of the biggest challenges for the Indian Railways is to track and manage rakes. Rakes often run dead miles after unloading at a destination, while other locations experience a shortage of rakes. Sometimes the data is not available at the right time for the huge railway network. Also, the sheer size and the scale of operations of the railway network make asset management and optimum utilisation of the available rolling stock difficult.

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Indian Railways earns almost 65% of revenue from freight movement. However, the market share has been on a decline due to the constant pressure from other transport and logistics services. With alternative mode of freight movement readily available, customers have become more demanding in terms of delivery status and value for the money they pay.

This has given rise to a growing effort to implement the latest technology to improve performance. According to R. B. Das, group general manager, Centre for Railways Information Systems, “Due to a lack of continuous cargo visibility and end-to-end commitment to freight customers, an important element of supply chain management could not have been incorporated without the help of IT.”

Also, the absence of online or real-time reports was making it difficult to keep a track on the status of the cargos. Further, replication of the bulky data was difficult and extracting exact information from the heap was another cumbersome process.

Collaborating with CRIS and CMC

The FOIS was deployed across the country in association with Centre for Railways Information Systems (CRIS) and CMC. CMC and CRIS realised that a fair amount of customisation and modification was required to suit the typical requirements of the Indian Railways.

FOIS, built upon BEA Tuxedo and BEA WebLogic Server was implemented in phases. FOIS comprises of two parts: The Rake Management System (RMS) and the Terminal Management System (TMS). The RMS has already been implemented and TMS is in the process of implementation.

There is an in-house software development team at CRIS. The software development for the prototype system, which was outsourced is now handled by the in-house development team. The use of BEA Tuxedo platform in the core module was instrumental in the successful implementation of RMS and TMS. The latency of MIS generation has been cut to half a day from almost a week. This has helped increase the efficiency and the productivity of the whole system.

Indian Railways is also expanding access to core applications through the web. BEA WebLogic Servers will integrate with BEA Tuxedo to enable web-based access to various applications. This will improve information dissemination to clients through e-mails and instant messages.

Efficient utilisation of resources

BEA Tuxedo has facilitated better bandwidth utilisation on the railway network. The solution has efficiently compressed the data and transmits using less bandwidth. Das believes, “The application has been successfully able to manage huge data along with other processes. Integration and compatibility of BEA Tuxedo with other operating systems and the client servers of the other companies at a significantly lower cost than its competing products, at the time of selection of technology, was a major factor that prompted the Railways to go for BEA.”

Now the efficient scheduling and quick turnaround of rakes enables effective and optimum utilisation of existing assets and resources. Tracking of rakes or individual wagons is possible in real time along with live monitoring of all freight trains which is enabling recipients of consignments to get an accurate forecast of cargo arrival.

Indian Railways is also in the process of deploying Wagon Maintenance applications. It has already started the pilot project on ePayment system that will enable mobile and handheld access devices to o be integrated in the system to reduce data entry losses and latency.