TCS Intelligent Planning for Railways
Optimize Rail Network Capacity
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HIGHLIGHTS
- Railway passenger and freight volumes are on the rise, posing a challenge to operators and infrastructure owners in meeting the demand as rail infrastructure is limited.
- Building new rail infrastructure to cater to this increase in passenger, freight volume will take time as it is capital-intensive with extended gestation period.
- TCS Intelligent Planning for Railways enables railway capacity and timetable planners to maximize utilization of existing infrastructure.
Overview
Rail transport is gaining importance in the fight to minimize carbon emissions.
Increasing passenger and freight volumes underline the growing demand for rail transport. However, building new rail infrastructure to meet the demand is capital intensive and has an extended gestation period. Hence, maximizing the utilization of existing infrastructure is crucial.
Rail organizations are looking for faster train service planning and design to maximize capacity utilization with available network and to fulfil fluctuating demand patterns. Rail Infrastructure managers need to plan for different scenarios like additional capacity, temporary unavailability of existing capacity due to maintenance and renewal works, and, finally, additional services on existing capacity. Advanced methods of operations research enable planners to rapidly do such optimization using simple descriptions of the infrastructure and the intended services.
Solution
TCS Intelligent Planning for Railways uses proprietary algorithms to maximize railway capacity, especially for cyclic services.
The solution leverages TCS’ deep domain research in railway planning and scheduling, and insights obtained through collaboration with railway industry experts.
The TCS Intelligent Planning for Railways solution helps railway organizations and government entities exploit existing infrastructure to the fullest. It also helps them decide on investments in new infrastructure by evaluating their expected capacity needs.
The state-of-the-art solution has the following components:
- Analytical tool: Advanced analytical tool for infrastructure managers to optimize capacity by maximizing the number of trains. It enables users to conveniently configure infrastructure details, train services, run and halt times, their frequencies and examine different scenarios quickly.
- Easy-to-use user interface: A simple and rich user interface to define train types, train details, and infrastructure at an intermediate level of detail.
- Results and reports: Displays a pictorial view of various train instances through a time-distance chart after performing a detailed analysis using optimization methods.
- Ease of Integration: Enables users to import infrastructure and train information data in a pre-defined format and export the output to be consumed by other enterprise systems.
Benefits
The TCS proprietary solution provides rail organizations with various insights to optimize capacity and make faster decisions.
It can do the following to help rail organizations manage their services better:
- Strategic capacity analysis to identify where additional infrastructure is required
- Tactical capacity analysis insights that help understand to what extent additional services can be introduced from the unaltered or modified rail infrastructure
- Analysis of impact on services due to temporary capacity unavailability
- Analysis of the number of trains that can be run to ensure timetable in the face of unexpected random delays by increasing train run-times and halt-times
- Run what-if scenarios faster, shortening the planning exercise duration and creating reliable and robust services
- For services that repeat at regular frequencies, it minimizes the cycle time over which a given number of repetitions can happen
The TCS advantage
A partnership with TCS can help rail organizations and government entities stay on top of the most pressing challenges hindering growth.
An association with TCS will enable entities to take advantage of the following key differentiators:
- Domain experience and expertise: TCS brings more than 25 years of transport and rail industry experience supporting over 15 major rail and transit customers across the globe, covering core industry functions. Our partnerships with customers in their growth and transformation journey leverage deep domain knowledge, contextual mastery, and technology expertise to enable our transport customers to digitally transform their core systems around operations planning and asset management.
- Capacity planning as a service: Customers can themselves start planning scenarios with quick configuration of their data or can engage TCS to deliver capacity analysis as a service and focus on critical decision-making by subject area experts.
- Partnership with rail consultants and researchers: TCS has strategic partnership with rail consultants and researchers who bring extensive experience in planning and market-specific know-how.