Technology in Public Transport: Moving Passengers to Centre-Stage
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VERTICAL FOCUS Technology in Public Transport: Moving Passengers to Centre-stage Public transportation authorities across India are experimenting with the use of IT beyond e-ticketing and mapping/tracking of routes. Developers have big opportunities as projects are often undertaken by consulting external expertise — Hiren Mehta n any mass transit system, more often than not I saw one really compelling use of Google Maps when there are two big factors in making decisions about I was in LA. It showed live traffic situation on all the roads. IT systems to be deployed: Scalability and Security. If there were traffic jams or snarls, then those portions of IIt is because of the challenges of dealing with such the road were colored red, while free roads were colored a volume of real-time data, which can be potentially green. It helps commuters change their route on the fly.” misused to cause damage to life and property, that public From a security perspective, determining the near- transport authorities are gradually realizing that they real-time location of trains might be a risk to ensure need to ramp up their IT systems and keep passengers safety, which is why RailRadar states that the informa- better informed through automated means. This also tion provided is delayed by atleast 5 minutes. One such presents many challenging opportunities for developers. website ( http://www.simran.in ), which was started some And this isn’t limited to booking tickets such as with time ago in collaboration with IITK with the objective of IRCTC or tracking freight trains through FOIS. providing near-real-time tracking for a few select trains in the pilot phase, was closed w. e. f. 1 October 2012, along- Railways are slowly coping up with it’s accompanying SMS service. However, the original with the scale Train Enquiry website (and it’s SMS service) continues to One such tool, which was recently released by Indian provide tracking information that is regularly updated for railways, is RailRadar, meant exclusively for passenger most trains. Indian Railways have even released a mobile trains, available at http://railradar.trainenquiry.com. Anil app for TrainEnquiry.com that relies on jQueryMobile for Chopra, Editor, PCQuest used the same a few weeks ago device/browser support. and here is his feedback: The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation was learnt to have “It has some merit, but leaves a lot to be desired. The taken up the task earlier this year to modify signaling and train search is very good. Simply type even partial name telecom software so that passengers can know whether of the train and it will automatically search and show you the next arriving train will have four coaches or six and a list of all trains with matching characters. Click on the accordingly position themselves on the platform. relevant train from the list, and it immediately shows you its current location on the map. A little arrow indicates the End-to-end connectivity present direction of the train. You can zoom into the map, which is a different set of challenges for standard Google Maps functionality, but the utility of the road transport service ends after that. It doesn’t show the tracks to indi- Similar activities are happening in road transport too. cate which station is the train coming from and which one In Mumbai, BEST undertaking, in collaboration with is it heading to. I entered Gomti Express, and got four op- Verve Compusoft, has developed http://www.bestpis. tions. I clicked on one and it immediately showed me the in for tracking each individual BEST bus on Mumbai’s train’s current location. But after some time, when I clicked roads. While earlier this included all buses as well as on another Gomti Express, it said the train is currently was plotted on a map which was refreshed every few not running. In fact, after this, I kept on clicking on all the seconds, now it is limited to AC buses only and is listed Gomti Express trains in the list and got the same response. in a table of the routes instead of using a map (as of the So reliability of the service is questionable. time of writing this). 38 PCQUEST DECEMBER 2012 pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] In Bengaluru, road transport has been combined (ignoring the surrounding elevation of the map) that shows with traffic regulation and law enforcement information the current layout of the Borivali railway station (with one to result in http://www.btis.in , which offers a wealth of of the many model trains available having reached platform features (including bus routes) to help travellers find their 1 in the simulated environment) in Mumbai to a reasonable way. Shown here is a screenshot of the live traffic situa- degree of accuracy. This was designed in Simutrans. tion in Bengaluru as of the time of writing this. Since such tools are open-source and cover multiple modes of transport (road, rail, el- evated rail, skybus, monorail, metro, maglev, trams, ships, aircrafts, are all supported), developers may find it beneficial to tweak the algorithms used for distance calculation, path-finding, mapping and scheduling themselves to realize not only how they can make the flow smoother by changing a few parameters and then running the simu- lation but also to maximize revenue by ensuring optimal load utilization. Both OpenTTD and Simutrans are very powerful at this, although they are gen- erally used as games for enthusiasts. OpenTTD even supports simulating ac- cidents, while Simutrans offers a more In Pune and Delhi, it has taken the form of http:// pleasing set of graphics for visualization. www.ptis.in and http://www.dtis.in respectively. Regulatory initiatives have stepped up Attractive opportunities lie in store Aside from e-ticketing and tracking methods used by the for developers public at large, the railways are also learnt to be working Developers have lots of opportunities to assist in projects on developing a train collision avoidance system (TCAS) with such undertakings, not necessarily limited to tracking for which six indigenous firms have been shortlisted so of vehicles/ finding suitable routes for a given trip. There far after floating the EoI. The earlier anti-collision device are many free transport simulators available today (such (ACD), over which TCAS will be an improvement, made as Simutrans and OpenTTD) which can assist developers use of GPS and has seen moderately successful trials in in modeling routes and finding out potential bottlenecks Northeast Frontier Railway and Southern Railway. MoUs by simulating both freight and passenger movement. For for upgradation and modernization of the infrastructure instance, shown in the image is a schematic representation have been signed with various countries such as Spain, Austria and Belgium in the last few months by the Ministry of Railways. Referring to the existing Belgium involvement in Indian Railway sector, the Belgium Deputy Prime Minister & Minister for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade and European Affairs of Belgium, Didier Reynders said that several Belgium or Belgium-based companies are already firmly present in India and their activities range from the fastening and coating of rails to the delivery of parts for the train construction and software for safety and network management. pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] DECEMBER 2012 PCQUEST 39.