Indian Railways moves full speed to track punctuality of trains! Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) has successfully commissioned Phase I of the Real-Time Train Information System (RTIS) for Piyush Goyal-led Indian Railways! The system provides real-time train information to the national transporter, thereby increasing its operational efficiency as well as enhancing passenger safety. The RTIS system has been commissioned through the Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS), which is the Information Technology arm of Indian Railways, under the technical guidance of Space Applications Centre (SAC), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The system provides Indian Railways with real-time positional information of locomotives and also facilitates the automatic acquisition of train movement data, including that of departure, arrival and run-through timings, at the railway stations en route.
According to a press release issued by the PSU, the control chart of trains, which has RTIS-enabled locomotives, gets plotted in the Control Office Application (COA) system of Indian Railways automatically. Without any manual intervention, the train controllers can track the location as well as the speed of RTIS-enabled locomotives or trains accurately. Thus, the system facilitates accurately and also, it optimizes traffic management as well as improves operational efficiency and pre-empts accidents, the press release stated.
According to BEL, the RTIS project involved the installation of locomotive devices. The locomotive device tracks the location of trains using 4G/3G mobile data service and S-Band Mobile Satellite Service (S-MSS) of ISRO’s GSAT 6 satellite, setting up of MSS Hub as well as Data Centre with hardware and application software at CRIS, Chanakyapuri.
The PSU stated that the technology of the locomotive device has been indigenously developed. The overall application software, including the HUB Network Monitoring System (NMS), has been developed by the PSU. The system is an example of Modi government’s ‘Make in India’, that has been entirely designed, developed as well as manufactured within the country, the PSU added.