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Project Report

‘Indian Railways Reservation Case’

Corporate Information ManagementSubmitted to:

Railways Reservation Case Page 1

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................................42.OBJECTIVE ...........................................................................................................................53.ARCHITECTURE GRID .......................................................................................................64.STRATEGIC GRID ...............................................................................................................75.CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTOR & DECISION MAKING PROCESS FOR NEW PRS RESERVATION SYSTEM.......................................................................................................86.IMPORTANT BUSINESS RULES TO BUILD RESERVATION SYSTEM.....................107.ER-DIAGRAM – PRS/Railway Reservation System...........................................................12BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................13

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1. INTRODUCTION

Corporate Information Management Inventory helps us in learning the fundamentals

underlying the modeling, design, development, control, evaluation, and strategic use of

computer-based information systems for corporate to run their business in this competitive

world efficiently, effectively, and profitably.

2. OBJECTIVE

The Objective of the project is to provide the following referring to the Railway reservation

case in particular, the Indian Railways in general.

Creation of Architecture grid with clear illustrations of its components.

Representation of all the applications of the case in the strategic grid (Cash,

McFarlan & McKenney)

Listing of all the critical success factors for the reservation system.

Representation of the decision making process involved in the case (whether to go

for a completely new system or not) in a hierarchical structure.

Enumeration of the important business rules used in the case to build a reservation

system and represent these rules in ER-diagram.

3. ARCHITECTURE GRID

4. STRATEGIC GRID

5. CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTOR & DECISION MAKING PROCESS FOR NEW PRS RESERVATION SYSTEM

The most critical success factor for the PRS system is the support, without the proper

support in place the prolonged breakdown in the application can lead to severe

disruption of all types of the rail services in the country, the PRS should be

supportable and give the better uptime.

The New PRS system should be available 24*7 across the counters for Indian railway,

currently the existing system is not available all the time rather there is 4 hours

downtime associated with the existing system.

The PRS system should be unambiguous and correct to build the credibility and

handle the large customer volume.

The PRS should be consistent across various situations.

The New system should provide the enhanced and greater maintenance flexibility.

The New system should be able to meet or beat the existing system at any point of

time in terms of load that is the most important critical factor for the proposed/ new

PRS system.

The PRS should use the component based architecture rather than using the

monolithic application architecture that will help making changes changing business

rules quickly.

The PRS should be able to handle the fast paced sustainable growth as the case

clearly indicate that the growth of the PRS centers from last couple of years has been

exponential and is going to continue in the same way in near future, keeping this

into account, the PRS system should be able to handle this growth and should be

sustainable.

The PRS should be able to meet or beat the current system performance where the

system uptime is close to 99.2% and the average transaction latency is less than 3

seconds.

The team should be able to handle the support and will be able to take care of issues

that might come in the future, the team should be provided the appropriate training

to take care of the support calls and carry out the whole support on their shoulders.

The PRS should provide the universal standard- based system unique to IR that

would enable partner organizations to access information in a controlled fashion

from the PRS and in future the same interfaces can be used to tap into the larger

travel management community to offer innovative travel packages to the

passengers.

A steady technology evolution is needed to create to the new PRS without

destabilizing the existing PRS.

The PRS system should be in such a way so that it can be extended if needed and

change the functionality without affecting the customers or system in process,

currently the existing system that is written in c and use the Transaction Processing,

monitoring and changing the software is a tedious task that needs an overhaul using

the flexible DBMS system which can change the programming logic as per ever

changing business logic.

The existing PRS system handles various parameters like various types of train,

quotas, classes, discounts/ concessions and coaches, the proposed/ new system

should be able to carry out the same variability and support the current process.

The PRS System should provide the better working environment The PRS creates an

environment to reduce the unethical practices in reserving accommodation.

The PRS should be deployed in such a way so it can reserve the seat from any station

over Indian Railway, possibly from any PRS counter.

The PRS should work in such a way so passengers need not to wait in long queue

rather the transaction should be fast enough to get completed to reduce the

customer waiting time.

6. IMPORTANT BUSINESS RULES TO BUILD RESERVATION SYSTEM

The important business rules for reservation system are is given below –

1. The booking should have prospective customer/ Passenger Name and Identification

as the attributes.

2. Seat availability needs to be up-to-date at any time to ensure that the data is fresh

and not stale, every transaction needs to be atomic however consistent to establish

the online purity to double check that not the same seat is booked against two

separate requests.

This means the transactions should follow the ACID property of database.

3. Ideally the PNR number should be the primary key to find out the details/ status of

any booking/ cancellation of the existing booking.

4. Customer/ passenger details are required to kick-off the reservation process, this

should have contain these mandatory fields

Name

Identification – preferably the passport no./ PAN no./ License no.

Gender

Age

Address – office or residential address.

Phone no. – Residential or office no.

Gender – male/ female

5. The reservation data/ status/ availability can also be provided if customer knows –

The train details – train number, train name or the route from where

(source) to where (destination) the journey needs to be completed.

6. While reserving the seats customer needs to tell the preference – A/C, first and

second class, sleepers, general etc. where the seats are required with the number of

seats that are needed, since India has quota system based on that the ticket prices

vary or waived off for some cases these quotas– senior citizens, kids, army

personnel, railway staff, need to be presented during the reservation process.

7. On completing the reservation process, passenger is required to pay the fare that

ideally needs to be told before taking the print out or hard copy of the tickets.

8. While canceling the reservation, the PNR number is required, at the same time how

many number of seats, Date and class are also the mandatory attributes that are

required to cancel the reservation.

7. ER-DIAGRAM – PRS/Railway Reservation System

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thank You!