Title - IIT-B, Western Railways join forces to close gap between trains

A team from the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) and the Computer Science Engineering departments of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) and the operations department of Western Railway has begun work on trying to tweak the running of trains in such a manner that the current gap of three minutes between each train can be brought down further.

This gap — called headway in train operations lingo — if reduced, would allow more trains to run in an hour and also improve punctuality of trains.

The team led by professor Narayan Rangaraj of the IEOR and professor Abhiram Ranade of the Computer Science Engineering department along with some students made a presentation to a WR team led by its Chief Operation Manager RK Tandon and newly-appointed Divisional Railway Manager Shailendra Kumar.

While Rangaraj, with a doctorate in Mathematics from John Hopkins University, is an expert in train operation management, Ranade is an expert in the analysis of algorithms and has earlier written on train pathing.

Dr Rangaraj told that the aim is to look at train-running as a whole and make changes to it to improve efficiency. “We are studying everything from the acceleration and de-accelaration of trains to track characteristics, including speed restrictions and the spacing of signals, turnaround at terminals, etc. and suggest a more efficient system”. “We run 1,300-odd trains. We would like to increase the efficiency of the system by improving the punctuality of our trains. This study would help us do that”, said Dr Rangaraj.

WR’s suburban lines are a headache-inducing grid of slow, fast and long-distance trains that run on four suburban tracks – two slow and two fast – and an oddity called the Suburban Track Avoidance (STA) line, a line on which long-distance trains run in both directions.