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Touch Screen Aids Railway Crew Booking
By Neelu Lekhi
Mumbai, Nov 22, 2006

The Central Railway administration will replicate success of its SIGN Safe system at Nagpur to other divisions.

SIGN Safe systems are touch screen points installed at the guard lobby on the Nagpur Railway station. Touch screens activate when a loco pilot or a motorman registers his presence.

The system operates on a VB .Net platform, with Oracle 9i database as the back-end. It has been developed by Ms MISCOS, Bhopal.

SIGN Safe replaces the manual attendance sheet. It ensures proper booking of engine crew, safety of train operation, monitors complete work of the loco pilot/guard. A unique feature of SIGN Safe is that it activates a guard's duty roster only if the person is declared fit following a breath analyzer test.

Commissioned in October 2006, the administration is installing more such touch screens at Amla, Ballarshah and Junnardeo. Central Railway Information System (CRIS) is assisting the project.

Sunil Kumar Agrawal, DRM, Nagpur, says, "Only medically fit motormen will be allowed to man trains. The system maintains a log of defects when the train is navigating. These defects are immediately reported to the control rooms."

"The cost of installation of system is approximately Rs.3 lakh," adds Agrawal.
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Will this provide a much needed safety solution for railways?
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The solution is fine, but in the long run the costs could be killing. Wondering why the Railways could not think about Open Source OS and settled with Microsoft. The world is moving towards Open Source and the benefits of Opn source vis-a-vis closed source are well known. Linux can be made available at a fraction of the cost and with better functionality, top-level kernel security features, crash-proof features and lower recurring cost. Just like the railways is for the Junta, Linux is meant for Aam aadmi.
- Rohit Banseedha Anonymous Mumbai
13/12/06 10:38 AM
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  The new centralized approach is on LINUX now. The centralized system has been commissioned at 122 locations already and there are over 8500 crew getting booked daily through the system. The old windows based system which was a standalone system has now be discarded now
- Deepak CRIS Delhi
24/06/08 06:45 AM
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On second thoughts, why has the solutions not been written on J2EE or JEE?? Why has it been written on .net - which locks in customers and customers cannot shift their software code to any other language? Surprising!
- Rohit Banseedha Anonymous Mumbai
13/12/06 10:57 AM
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Crew Management System (CMS) supports booking of Freight, Coaching and Shunting Crew of the Indian Railways, which is amoungst the largest rail networks of the world and has over one lakh guards drivers and shunters catering to the train operations. The software solution automates their day-to-day business functionalities for better crew management by providing information and rostering their duty allocations at all times, in addition to information regarding the presence of crew at home station or out station maintain their status-wise records and assign crew to the trains. CMS is an IT project of Indian Railways which performs all the tasks of booking crew on all types of trains services. It has been developed to bring in, transparency and accuracy of information, and provides instant access of information to it?s users so that they can take effective business decisions to control crew and optimize on the crew cost. The software system has started to roll out in Dec 2007 and presently, about 1000 data entry nodes, over 350 crew interaction KIOSKs have been commissioned at over 144 crew booking points spread on 9 Zones and 30 divisions of Indian railways Spread mainly in Central, Western, Northern belts of India. CMS at present has over 35000 crew under it?s control and is booking more than 8000 crew daily through it. By Sept 2008 another 140 locations will come up on Eastern, Southern and North frontier regions on Indian Railways. 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. It is a system for management and control of crew movement that also assists managers and supervisors to optimize asset utilization. CMS is a role based, work flow based applications and has all the components needed at any crew booking point. 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 display 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 immense 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. CMS is a web based application which is operational on 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 frame 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 Varity user access requirement. Thin client are not only lower in cost but also have a better life since they do not have moving parts. 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. 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.
- Deepak CRIS New Delhi
23/06/08 06:25 AM
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bill inquary
- nandkishore jai bsnl chindwara
18/03/08 10:33 PM
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