Sunday, July 19, 2009

Need of Electronic Interlocking System (EIS) for Indian Railways

Indian Railway is in acute need of Electronic Interlocking System for many reasons. The design and the verification process of these signalling systems needs to be inline with the (European Standards) CENELEC standards, which over the time have proven their usefulness in dealing with vital equipment. Apart from all these, the Indian railway has its own needs, which are quite different from other countries.  There has to be indigenous solution to these problems. The below points try to describe the attributes of an indigenous developed EIS

 

  1. To improve the safety standards and increase the revenue by increased line speeds.
  2. To invest less in maintenance of signalling infrastructure and thereby increase the profits.
  3. To decrease the installation and commissioning time compared to RRI.
  4. To give the flexibility in changing the software, whenever there is change in the yard layout.
  5. To give flexibility of centralized control from operations control centre , instead of localized control panels
  6. To decrease the burden on operators and maintenance staff by giving warnings about the signalling equipment due for replacement.
  7. To give more flexibility for the maintainer to sit at his desk and monitor the yard.
  8. To eventually move from localized operations to Computer aided dispatch systems (CAD)
  9. To support a supervisory control centre, to look at movement of trains.
  10. To support coded track circuits in future for ATP operations in locomotive.
  11. To eliminate the use of separate data and event loggers.
  12. To support the interface to web browsers to supervisory activities.
  13. To eventually support CAB signalling to communicate with trains.
  14. To support delivery of automated messages to control centers in case of device malfunctions.