Indian Railways Crew Management

Center for Railway Information System (CRIS) is all set to roll out Crew Management System (CMS) for Indian Railways on a nationwide level. The authorities are confident for a national roll out of this project by this October.

The crew comprising of drivers and guards are critical resources for the running of trains and to manage their job scheduling is a tedious job for the railways. The CMS provides information about these crew persons at all times and thus facilitates the booking of crew on freight trains, passenger carrying trains as well as short movements within terminals and yards.

While elaborating about this roll out, "We were not only facing issues in the management of the crew's job scheduling, while doing this job manually, however, lot of railway resources were under utilized. That point of time, we understood the need for a automated system which can lead to a effective and optimum utilization of the manpower," said RB Das Group General Manager, CRIS. Train travel is safe, cheap and comfortable (in AC classes). First Railway in World..........

Developed by CRIS, CMS has completed a successful pilot and its been rolled out in half of the nation's railway coverage.
Being world's largest railway network, Indian Railways has nearly one lakh guards and drivers for performing train operations round the clock.
However, in terms of so far experience and monitory savings that this automated system have managed to get for the railways, Deepak Ganju, General Manager - Project III, CRIS informed, "Before this system every month Rupees 5 Lacks were been given as the overtime dues to drivers and guards. This amount is been reduced to 1 lack every month. Apart from this cost saving, we are able to monitor the health aspects of drivers who are on duty, their track records, their extra time payment are also been taken care."
CRIS has developed the software in-house using J2EE technology and the trial of the software were started in the mid 2007 for 5 Lobbies spread on Western Railway.
The software system was rolled out in Dec 2007 and at present about 1000 data entry nodes at over 144 crew booking points have been commissioned. These are spread over 9 Zones and 30 divisions of the Indian Railways, mainly in Central, Western, Northern regions of India. CMS at present has a database covering 40,000 crew members and over 10000 crew members are being booked daily through the system. Indian Railways are also the world's biggest employer, with over 1.5 million staff. easy way to travel in India

By October 2008 another 140 locations will come up on Eastern, Southern and North Frontier regions thereby computerizing crew booking over the Indian Railways.
CMS has been developed to bring in transparency and accuracy of information so that decision makers can take effective business decisions to control crew and optimize on crew utilization. Informing about what exactly this solution does, Ganju added, "This automates the day-to-day business functions of the crew thereby providing information of their status, rostering their duty allocations, providing information on the availability of crew at their home station and assigning crew to the trains."
He further informed, CMS enables it's users to have instant access to information regarding the current status of crew at all times and maintain their inventory at all times. Ganju said, "It is a system for management and control of crew movement that also assists managers and supervisors to optimize asset utilization. It operates for Freight, Shunting and Coaching services and provides booking of drivers, guards, assistant drivers and shunters. It has also all the elements which make a lobby paper less namely by displaying of circular, caution, abnormality reporting, quiz for knowledge improvement of crew and crew self services. Inspectors can also monitor their drivers and evaluate their safety and operational performance."

CMS users have been provided instant access to the central database not only through web based access but also through SMS over mobile phones. CMS provides functionality in terms of crew booking and call acknowledgement through SMS, giving lobby managers morning position of it's crew at various locations enabling them to plan their deployment on trains. In case of crew shortage at a location alerts are generated for the supervisor to intervene and control it. Crew can have his personnel information related to crew milage, crew status, turn of booking, mandatory requirement, medical information on his mobile phone. Direct data access over mobile phones brings in greater transparence, visibility of information to customer saving a lot of time in decision making.
For data entry at client (lobby) locations standard keyboard access has been provided to the clerks and supervisor using the system. However the crew interacts with CMS system through touch screen kiosk. "Crew has been provided with Bio-Metric (thumb impression reader) access makes his authenticity devoid of any proxy reporting and at the same time making it legally binding. The solution becomes more user friendly as the crew has to no more remember his passwords or carry smart cards with him to log into the CMS system." Gunju informed.
CMS provides for global tracking of all the crew on the CMS system in real time whether the crew is on train, rest at HQ, rest at outstation, on leave or training. It provides for their seamless integration with the CMS application so as to enable user to derive benefit of crew accountal at all time and enable it's user to cut down running cost with the help of built in business logics of the CMS system.

CMS is a web based application which is operational on an internal WAN of Indian Railways. The application is an in-house development of CRIS developed using Rational Application Development and testing tools in J2EE, struts framework with DB2 database. It utilizes thin client at a client location giving immense power from central locations to control the client location by way of maintenance task, time synchronization and a variety of user access requirement. Thin client are not only lower in cost but also have a better life since they do not have moving parts.
The server architecture is designed to ensure high-level security to access different functional components. The security is provided at the infrastructure layer, application layer and at the user authentication layer to provide controlled access to the system with user authentication information stored in a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory.
The solution architecture for the CMS Solution is Environmental friendly and has been designed in such a way that the CMS uses the TFT and thin client technology which saves nearly 2 kilowatt of power for each crew booking locations over the conventional PC's and CRT monitors based system. This system when fully functional shall save 464400 units per month which shall result in an annual saving of INR 2.5 Crores per annum energy conservation.

Crew Management System software has a number of smart initiatives to support train crew in their day-to-day business functions. It is a 24 x 7 role based, multilingual application having the following smart initiatives.
In another feature, the solution utilizes thin client at a client location giving immense power from central locations to remotely control the client location by way of maintenance task, time synchronization and varity user access requirement.
After the complete roll out of this solution, CRIS is also looking at adding more features on this solution, these features could be synchronization with breath analyzer. Ganju added, "Crew before sign on has undergone to breath analysis process. The breath analyzer devices are being interfaced with the CMS system insuring greater safety of train operation."