Computerized Passenger Reservation System for Indian Railways – Its Development and System Architecture

This paper explores the need, development of computerized passenger reservation system for Indian railways. The passenger reservation system is based on online transaction processing. It was given the name Integrated Multitrain Passenger REServation System (IMPRESS) which later developed into single image system called Countrywide Network Of Computerized Enhanced ReservaTion (CONCERT). Then this paper goes onto the general architecture of the system which is 3-tier client server architecture. Apart from the obvious advantage of being computerized over manual reservation and enquiry, this paper explores other advantage of implementing this system and its future. Keywords— passenger reservation, computerized enhanced reservation, integrated multi-train, IMPRESS, CONCERT Introduction Indian Railways is the principal mode of transport in the country. It is one of the world’s largest rail networks under a single management. The route length is around 63,332 km with more than 8000 stations [1]. As it is the backbone of nation’s transport system, IR owns more than 25,000 wagons, 45,000 different types of coaches and 8000 locomotives. The system carries about 5,000 million passengers generating a traffic output of 340 billion passenger kms [2, 3]. Need for Computerized PRS The seat/ berth reservation on trains is pretty complex activity, not only because of the volumes involving around lac seats/ berth reservations per day, but also because of several different categories of trains operating, using some 72 types of coaches with seven classes of reservation, more than 40 types of quotas and more than 80 kinds of concessional tickets [1,]. The method of calculation of fare is also quite complex as charges are based on distance, comfort level and transit time. Also there were many infirmities with the manual system like the current status did not get updated, it was slow and time consuming, inadvertent errors and malpractices in reservation were there [4]. Because of the complexity and sheer volumes involved, there was a need for development of computerized reservation system [3, 4]. Development Of The System The pilot project consisting of a few trains was implemented at New Delhi in 1985 by joint efforts of CRIS and CMC [3]. Then, there was no looking back. The major milestones in the development of PRS are shown in the figure 1. The passenger reservation system was given the name Integrated Multi-train Passenger REServation System (IMPRESS) which could handle the functional requirements of reservation, enquiry, accounting and charting [4, 5]. It also had backup and recovery facilities. The entire PRS system was based on five stand-alone systems (New Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai and Secunderabad). Other stations were connected as remote terminals to the existing five computer systems for accessing the entire database of host computer [5]. But with stand-alone architecture, it is not possible to do a reservation at a terminal from databases in two different host computers. There was a provision of remote terminals from more than one host computer to partially take care of this, but that meant passenger had to stand in more queues [6]. This one-to-one communication and linkage reduced the overall efficiency of the system and led to the development of single image system called CONCERT (Countrywide Network of Computerized Enhanced ReservaTion [6, 7]. It is one-to-many communication thus requiring less process time. In the first phase of CONCERT implementation, IMPRESS software version at the two stand-alone PRS systems (Secunderabad and New Delhi) which later got extended to other systems. After the full scale implementation, requirement of communication channels came down, as there was no need to extend circuits for connecting remote terminal to particular PRS location only, as every terminal became universal [7]. It also added multiple lap functionality resulting in better customer service. Journal of En Volume 2, N