R Jai Krishna

NEW DELHI: The Indian Railways is all geared to conduct a pilot project for automatic identification of railway wagons using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system across India.

The Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) will oversee the pilot, run by a private firm.

According to highly placed sources at CRIS, the Indian Railways, decided to use RFID for effectively monitoring and utilizing the movement of wagons across the country.

"Indian Railways is the largest in the world and possesses about 230,000 freight wagons known freight railcars. Out of these, 200,000 wagons run on the Broad Gauge (BG) system. In order to improve the effective utilization of these wagons, it is proposed to implement a system of online tracking of these wagons as they move on the Railway system (comprising approximately 62000 route kilometers, including 48000 route kilometers on the BG system), using automatic identification and data capture methods," the sources said.

The sources said that during the 60-day pilot project, the railways proposes to use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, affixing RFID tags to about 500 wagons.

"The pilot project envisages fixing of radio-frequency tags on 500 wagons plying on a defined section and automatically reading the data at four to five locations using both fixed and hand-held readers. It further envisages moving and storing the data in near-real-time to a central server located in CRIS, New Delhi. Interfaces from this server will provide the data to Indian Railways' Freight Operations Information System (FOIS) and other applications," they said.

Sources said the pilot project shall be implemented in the Talcher – Paradeep – Vishakhapatnam section of the East Coast Railway.

Data will be read at the entrance and exits to the yards at Talcher, Paradeep, and Vishakhapatnam, and the data of wagon numbers read from each tag, with timestamp, will be updated in the FOIS application and / or with any other application at a later date.

"Tag readers would be placed at various locations along the track. Handheld readers would also be given to staff at key railway installations. The readers would read identification data off the tags. This data would be transmitted to a central server. The central server would maintain historical data of wagon movement to enable tracing of wagon movements as well. A set of standard interfaces would be built into the central server for the use of different applications requiring the wagon track and trace data," the sources informed.

"Tagging of the wagons owned by Indian Railways and installation of trackside readers would be executed in phases. The scope of the present tender is a pilot project on one section of Indian Railways. Before going in for a full-fledged implementation effort on IR, the results of the pilot system will be intensively monitored and evaluated for a period of approximately two months to identify potential problem areas and formulate strategies to eliminate the identified problems," the sources added.

The CRIS will also explore extending the system in future with encoding information other than vehicle identification in a dynamic fashion onto the tag, integration of sensor-based solution and integration with a GIS system.