In what is perceived as a major breakthrough for rail and road safety, an IIT-led consortium of academic institutions, companies, and R&D outfits have developed the satellite imaging for rail navigation system.
It has been developed as part of the Railway Safety Technology Mission, under N S Vyas, faculty member of IIT, Kanpur.
E-logistics, Chennai, and the Research Designs and Standards Organisation, Lucknow, a railways outfit, besides the IIT, were the other participants. TCS too will join in to upscale the system.
This technology can be used not only by the railways but also a number of other transport modes where tracking is involved.
SIMRAN, as the system has been named, is a train-tracking system, which enables monitoring every train in a certain geographical boundary for its location, speed, and the direction of movement. The information can be used for averting collisions.
It involves a simple implementation of the geo-positioning system, GSM, and radio frequency-based instrumentation.
The system provides information on the arrival of a train at the station, its departure, the time taken to move from one station to another, the position of the train between two stations being updated every minute, etc.
The railway timetable contains details of 600 trains, and information on all the 512 routes, besides information about locomotives, etc.