Beginning a new era of how the Railways apportions its gigantic inventory of berths, the AI-driven module, ‘Ideal Train Profile’, was able to shrink the size of the waiting list by “five to six per cent”.

The AI module processed patterns that included how passengers booked tickets, which origin-destination pairs were a hit or a flop, and at which time of the year. It also looked at which seats remained vacant for how much portion of the journey period.

THE INDIAN Railways has successfully concluded the massive trial of an Artificial Intelligence programme it built to fix a perennial, exasperating pain point-waiting lists.

Beginning a new era of how the Railways apportions its gigan- tic inventory of berths, the Al- driven module, ‘Ideal Train Profile’, was able to shrink the size of the waiting list by “five to six per cent”.

At the end of the trial, there were simply more confirmed tickets for travellers at the time of booking itself. Developed by the Railways’ in-house software arm, Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS), the ‘Ideal Train Profile’ was fed with information on about 200 long-distance trains, including the Rajdhanis.

The Al module processed pat- terns that included how passen- gers booked tickets, which ori-

At the end of the trial, there were more confirmed tickets for travellers at the time of booking. File

gin-destination pairs were a hit or a flop, and at which time of the year. It also looked at which seats remained vacant for how much portion of the journey period.

With data, to begin with, from the past three years stored in the Al module, engineers in- volved in the trial said the com- binations of “training data” that Ideal Train Profile’ could process were “virtually endless”.

variable data sets or possible ticket combinations by dividing a single journey into the number of halts and also processing passen- ger behaviour during these halts.

“If there are 60 halts in a long- distance train, the Al has learned about 1,800 possible ticket combi- nations. If there are 10 halts, then there are about 45 ticket combina- tions and so on,” a senior Railway Board official who did not want to They said the module learnt be named told The Indian Express, start of the Al trial.

According to officials in- volved in the testing, ‘Ideal Train Profile’ was made live at the start of the Advanced Reservation Period or a 120-day period be- fore the departure of trains, in this case January end. The trial covered passenger reservation systems in seven zonal railways.

The officials said the Railways was keen to test the kinks “well enough” before the May-June hol- iday period when the demand for confirmed tickets is the highest.

Rail Bhawan mandarins have generally admitted that many users turn away from the Railways because the national transporter is unable to provide upfront a con- firmed ticket. “The increased com- petition from airlines in the up- per-class long-distance and buses in the short distance travel has been a cause for concern,” Sunil Kumar Garg, Additional Member (Commercial) of the Railway Board, wrote in a letter to General Managers of zonal railways at the