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Abstract
Due to the vastness and complexity of railway net¬works in India, it is a tough problem to find routes connecting two stations. This paper describes RIS, a project aimed at developing an Intelligent Rail¬way Information system which finds direct as well as indirect rail routes between stations and displays the best ones based on a quality metric obtained from various user preferences.
1 Introduction
Due to the vastness and complexity of railway- networks in India, it is a tough problem to find train routes connecting two stations. The com¬plexity of the problem increases manifold when the two stations are not connected by direct trains but however have indirect routes connecting them, i.e. have trains connecting each to a common station. This complexity is further raised if the users choices, i.e. choices of timing, intermediate stations, cost etc. are taken into account and only those routes are listed which satisfy these constraints.
There is already online software existing to find routes consisting of direct trains between two stations and look up vacancies on those trains [1].
However, most of the stations in India are not connected by direct trains but have a huge number of indirect routes between each other. These are not given by the existing system. Also this system does not take into account the users preferences of time etc in mind while generating routes. Thus this software is not really of much use in route finding except maybe 3.S ctn automated railway timetable and enquiry system for vacancy information and travel rates.
This project has been aimed at developing RIS, an intelligent railway information system which can be accessed online via the internet by- users. It not only gives direct routes but also indirect routes and based on the users input tries to convert the users choices of time of arrival and departure, class of travel, interval between connecting trains, number of intermediate stations etc. into a quality metric and based on this metric generates the routes that satisfy it best. The routes are generated by either considering the direct trains, or by considering trains that connect the two stations to a common station. A list of important stations is maintained for each station which is search for such common stations. This reduces the search space greatly which would otherwise be the rest of the stations.