Importance of Railway Intelligent Transportation Systems and Architectural Design Issues of Indian Railway Network Scenario

The railway system, one of the backbones of transportation systems in many countries is becoming more and more complex. It plays increasingly significant role in economic development of the country. Therefore, it becomes necessary to ensure that it operates effectively, efficiently and safely. To achieve that railway industries have to move from old traditional manual work, mechanization and electronic usage to intelligent transportation system (ITS). The transformation of railway transportation to railway intelligent transportation system (RITS) can be a core stratagem to keep and improve the competivity from other modes of transportation. Rapid development of emerging technologies such as communication and computing, intelligent system, technological development of railway industries along with 36,000 kilometers (kms) of laid optical fiber cable make it feasible for Indian Railway (IR) to develop and design RITS. This new generation of railway transportation with higher speed, higher performance and zero tolerance for safety may be able to meet the challenges beyond IR vision 2020. The use of RITS architecture encourages structured development and integration of ITS systems that leads to maximization of benefits by minimizing redundancies and maximizing capabilities. This paper presents a distributed framework for a multi-layered RITS architecture that can be designed for integrating generated information. It also addresses the design issues and challenges in the IR scenario.