IIT Profs Show Officers How To Draw A Rail Timetable In 5 MINS Instead Of Wasting 15 Days

The Indian Railways is one of the largest rail networks in the world. Millions of people rely on this network to get to work each day. Several traders and businesses use it to get their products to market. However, such great scale beckons several complications. Numerous things need to fall precisely into place for the network to run at prime efficiency. Understandably, the Indian Railways could use some help.

Recently, a team of professors from IIT Bombay, in collaboration with the Central Railways, wrote algorithms to simplify the process of creating railway timetables. Earlier, it took railway officials 15 days to create a timetable. The algorithms have brought the process down to just 5 minutes!

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The software that the team developed unifies all the varied processes that rail officials need to employ like number of rakes and availability of platforms.

 

The project is so successful it has been selected to be presented at a global seminar by the International Association of Railway Operations Research (IAROR) in France. 

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The organisation is known for encouraging academic research and sets standards for rail traffic management across the globe.

 

The Chief Public Relations Officer for Central Railways, Narendra Patil, said that they have been working with the IIT professors on this projects for the past 2 years.

“This will not only help us in more efficient and easier planning but also give us a lot of options for adopting time tables for suburban operations according to our needs.”

India has never had a scarcity of talent. The issue has always been our inability to harness this talent effectively. This collaboration between the Railways and IIT Bombay sets a brilliant example how our nation’s remarkable talent can put our nation onto a one-way trip to becoming a superpower.

News Source: Mumbai Mirror

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