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 th
operations department of Western Railway has
begun work on trying to tweak the running of
trains in such a manner that the current gap o
three minutes between each train can be
brought down further.
This gap — called headway in train operations
lingo — if reduced, would allow more trains t
run in an hour and also improve punctuality o
trains.
On Monday, 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 le
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 dna 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” said Dr
Rangaraj.
Speaking to dna, Kumar said, “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 hel
us do that.”
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.
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