INDIAN RAILWAYS AND CRIS

INDIAN RAILWAYS
Indian Railways are the largest rail network in the world and the largest civilian organization under a single management. It is crossing the country’s vast geographical spread. Indian Railways are a multi-gauge, multi-traction system covering over 1-lakh track kilometers. Its work force is 1.65 million and it runs some 12000 trains everyday, including 8000 passenger trains. The outlook for the next year is to make Indian Railways (IR) a leading passenger carrying Railway in the world.
Harnessing the potential of these vast and widespread assets to meet the growing traffic needs of a developing economy is no easy task and makes IR a complex cybernetic system. Over the years, Railways have built up an elaborate and well established manual information system to help them monitoring their moving assets. Supported by a dedicated voice communications network, it collects and transmits information from the remotest corners of the country to control centers, at the highest level. The size and complexity of their operations, growing traffic and changing technologies, placed inevitably a heavy burden on this manual information system. Need for its modernization was, therefore, felt for some time.



CRIS
In 1982, Government decided to set up a Freight Operations Information System (FOIS). Later in 1986, Ministry of Railways established the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) to be an umbrella for all computer activities on Indian Railways. They also entrusted it with the task of design, development and implementation of the FOIS, along with its associated communications infrastructure.

CRIS: The Need

• To avoid duplication of efforts by individual Railways.
• To ensure standardization of computer hardware and software on the Railways.
• To undertake design and development of major applications on Railways requiring higher levels of expertise, faster decision making and system wide applicability.
• To insulate the organization from day to day working of the Railways, so that its objectives are not lost sight of.
• Need for a combined effort of Railways and Computer Specialists, considered best suited for the development of the computer applications on Railways.
• Need for development of expertise in highly specialized fields like Operation Research, Simulation, Expert System, CAD/CAM, and Process Control etc.
• Need for greater flexibility to keep pace with the fast changing technology.





CRIS: The Organization

CRIS has a two-tier management structure. At the apex is high-powered Governing Council. Among others, Chairman Telecommunication Commission, Chairman Railway Board, Financial Commissioner Railways, Secretaries Department of Electronics & Telecommunications are members of the Council. Minister for Railways is its Chairman. The Council lays down the policy framework and monitors the progress of CRIS activities.

The day-to-day management of the Center is entrusted with an Executive Committee under the Chairmanship of its Executive Director. Being an autonomous body it also Copts specialists and experts in the field of computers and communications on both its management bodies.

The activities of CRIS are organized under five divisions as shown in the figure:

CRIS: Passenger Reservation System (PRS)
PRS started in 1985 as a pilot project in New Delhi. The avowed objective was to provide reserved accommodation on any train from any counter, preparation of train charts and account of the money collected. When initial pilot project was implemented at Delhi, the software (referred to as version I) had a number of limitations. This were mainly removed in next version i.e. version II implemented in 1987. With the addition of new locations and many redesign needed the new version III evolved in 1990. Even the version III of the earlier software called Impress fell far short of the growing expectations of he traveling public and the need was felt to have software which has the capabilities of providing the Networking of the five independent PRS nodes namely Secundrabad, Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai and Chennai.














INTRODUCTION









INTRODUCTION TO CRMS:

Customer Relationship Management is a Web enabled, centralized information and management application to cater for the Indian Railways requirements in building best relations with its customer community by providing fast redressal mechanism to the customer grievances & self identified deficiencies. The entire software is laid into following modules:
 Login and Session Management
 Registration Module
 Operations Module
 User Activity Monitoring Module
 Search Module
 Report Generation Module
 Database Administration
 Feedback Module
 Discussion Forum Module
 Help Module

For the Phase II, CRM website will collect more information from the customers and give a better view to the authorities for planning enhancements, which ultimately lead to more customer satisfaction through the following steps:

1. Web enabling CRM –so that customers can directly register their complaints.

2. Inviting topics for discussion through a web forum; this shall also include suggestions management and appreciations management.

3. Linking Complaint Management with the Discussion forum - to bridge the thought-process and practice.

4. Automating interaction with customers –information sharing through mail server shall be automatic depending on the operations on complaints.

5. Enabling Multilanguage support –to go closer to the customer by crossing the language barrier.
Objective
The objective of this project proposal is to convert the application running on Active Server Pages to Microsoft Dot Net Framework using SQL Server as the RDBMS. This phase of software will take care of the following issues:

 Efficiency
 Improved performance through caching
 Easy Deployment and maintainability of code
 More Security for the website


BASIC ELEMENTS OF .NET



Microsoft® .NET is a set of Microsoft software technologies for connecting information, people, systems, and devices. It enables a high level of software integration through the use of Web services—small, discrete, building-block applications that connect to each other as well as to other, larger applications over the Internet.





The Components of Microsoft .NET


.NET is infused into the products that make up the Microsoft platform, providing the ability to quickly and reliably build, host, deploy, and utilize connected solutions using Web services, all with the protection of industry-standard security technologies.








"Smart" client application software and operating systems enable PCs and other smart computing devices to act on Web services, allowing anywhere, anytime access to information.
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Microsoft and others are developing a core set Web services—from authentication to calendaring—that can be combined with other Web services or used directly with smart client applications. The Microsoft MapPoint® Web Service allows you to integrate high-quality maps, driving directions, and other location intelligence into your applications, business processes, and Web sites is an example of one of these services.
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Microsoft provides the best server infrastructure—the Microsoft Windows Server System™—for deploying, managing, and orchestrating Web services.
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Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework are a complete solution for developers to build, deploy, and run Web services.
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.NET Architecture

Once you have the basic purpose and the list of user scenarios developed for your solution, you need to start looking at the general architecture, too. The main goal here is to identify the logical and physical aspects of the application—how you plan to break it up into useful sections. I've also added an item in this section covering security. Security is something you want to consider at the very beginning of your planning. Security is not something you "add at the end" of your development cycle. We cover this in more detail later in this section.

LOGICAL ARCHITECTURE

Logically, you want to plan out your solution to identify the "boundaries" between data storage, data access, business rules, user interface and so on. Typically, Web developers will opt for a two-stage model with WebForms holding all the code to access an existing data storage system such as Microsoft SQL Server™. A more robust approach is to create a middle-tier component library that stands between the WebForm user interface and the SQL Server data storage system. This three-tier approach (WebForms, component, database) is usually all that is needed for most applications. In some cases, however, an additional layer might be needed to handle transporting data between servers. This transport layer can be implemented using a platform-independent protocol such as XML-SOAP. However, if you are using Microsoft .NET technologies from end to end, you can use the binary version of the .NET Remoting protocol to do the same work much faster than XML-SOAP.
For our example, we'll define three logical boundaries: the user interface (WebForms), the middle-tier (a .NET component assembly),
and the data tier (SQL Server database). Figure 1 shows how this might be represented.

Figure 1. 3-Tier Diagram
We now have a simple logical model. How is this useful? It helps us think about the boundaries between each logical group. Each logical layer should act as independently as possible from the others. Ideally, changes in layers should have minimal impact on the whole. For example, if you changed the data storage from SQL Server to XML data files, the only other layer affected should be the middle tier layer. The user interface should not have to worry about the change at all. This should give you some ideas on how to implement the actual coding of the solution to enforce this kind of rule.
Also, the logical layers will help us think about security issues. The boundaries between each layer are potential security holes. And each layer will probably have its own specific security implementation (SQL Server rights, .NET runtime rights, ASP.NET security, and so on). Again, we'll address that in a later section here.





PHYSICAL ARCHITECTURE

Now that the logical layers are identified, it's also important to think about the physical layers. For example, you could implement this application all on a single physical machine that has the SQL Server, Internet Information Server, and ASP.NET and .NET runtimes all installed on the same machine. That would be one physical layer. But a more reliable and scalable approach would be to deploy the Web Forms on a cluster of three Web servers, the .NET component assembly hosted on a cluster of two application servers, and have the database hosted on a pair of SQL Servers in fail-over mode. That would result in a physical architecture that includes seven Windows servers in three main groups: Web cluster, component cluster, and database cluster. You might implement the code differently if you knew that the various logical parts of the system would be hosted on different machines.
For our case, we'll assume an efficient, but robust two-tier model: a Web server hosting both the user interface and the components and a database server hosting the SQL Server data storage. This model will give us the flexibility to add more servers in a cluster if the traffic gets high and still keep it simple enough for us to deal with on a small scale. The image below shows how this physical architecture maps against the logical architecture we defined earlier.
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