The Indian Railways has concluded the trial of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program it built to fix a perennial issue — long waiting lists for tickets.

Ideal Train Profile

• Ideal Train Profile was made by Railways’ in-house software arm Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).
• It was fed with information like how millions of passengers booked tickets on these trains, which origin-destination pairs were a hit and which were flops at what time of the year, which seats remained vacant for what portion of a journey, etc.
• This project has been in the works for the past two years, wherein the AI has been “taught” ticket booking data and trends of the past few years.
• It has come up with the best possible combination of how many berths to keep for which sectors and at what time.
• The combination of “training data” the AI has been fed goes back three years.

Significance of the project

• The AI-driven program has, for the first time, allocated vacant berths in over 200 trains in such a way that fewer people need to turn away without a confirmed ticket.
• The waiting lists on these trains, as a result, have seen a curtailment.

Need for AI in ticket booking

• Currently, the passenger is handed out a wait-listed ticket and asked to wait until four hours prior to departure, when the final seat chart is prepared, to see if she made the list.
• This is because a large number of berths are earmarked for various quotas and various origin-destination combinations of the train’s routes.
• If there are 60 halts in a long-distance train, then there are 1,800 possible ticket combinations of origin and destination.
• If there are 10 halts, there are typically about 45 ticket combinations and so on.
• The Ideal Train Profile’s AI tells the Passenger Reservation System how best to give out confirmed tickets and for which sectors.

Way forward

• The AI does data-driven remote location selection, completely automates the process of quota distribution, and suggests optimal quota for different ticket combinations based on historical demand.
• The project has got the Railway Board excited about the possibility of how it can manage busy season rush, when the demands of confirmed tickets are at a peak.
• So the coming summer vacation season will be the first big test for the new system.

Crack Prelims 2023! Talk to our Rankers

(Click) FREE 1-to-1 on-call Mentorship by IAS-IPS officers | Discuss doubts, strategy, sources, and more

Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024

Attend Now