Abstract:
Over 23 million daily passengers, including 2.1 million in the reserved segment, travel in the 12000 trains operated by Indian Railways (IR). IR faces a recurring challenge on meeting the demand for reserved tickets within the existing capacity of a train. A typical travel demand may fall in the one of nC2 origin-destination pairs on a train with n halts. Many passengers are issued waitlisted (overbooking) tickets at the time of purchase emanating from mismatch in supply and demand for tickets for multiple Origin-Destination combinations on a train.
The revenue managers were hitherto basing their seat-allocation decisions based on a time-consuming analysis of historical demand data, and experience. The Ideal Train Profile (ITP) utility is a Decision Support System (DSS) developed by the Centre for Railway Information Systems for assisting the revenue managers in deciding the optimal seat capacity considering multiple factors such as importance of the station on the train route, and preference for short/long distance passengers or being fair to all the observed origin-destination demand combinations. ITP has been implemented in over 2000 trains on IR, covering the reserved segment in all the inter-regional trains. The results are encouraging with substantial reduction in issue of waitlisted tickets.