Railway PRS (Passenger Reservation System) Project

Overview

The Indian Railways carries more than 10 lakh reserved passengers a day. The Passenger Reservation System (PRS) of the Indian Railways carries out more than 15 lakh transactions a day. The number of transactions far exceeds the number of passengers, because of wait-listed tickets and cancellations.

Transaction Distribution

Only about 4 lakh transactions a day are made through the IRCTC website. The remaining transactions, more than 10 lakh a day, are made at the PRS counters, which makes these counters essential to the system.

System Architecture

The character-mode PRS application runs on UNIX servers, and users access it online using dumb terminals and thin clients running in terminal emulation mode. The system is completely network-dependent.

Passenger-operated reservation kiosks are not currently available. Third-party reservations are now mostly made at Internet cafes.

Thinvent Products

Thinvent has developed both dumb terminals and thin clients optimised for PRS. The following modes of operation are supported:

  • Reservation and Cancellation

  • Bulk Booking

  • Inquiry

  • Local Charting

  • Network Charting

  • Reporting and Accounting

Technical Specifications

Networking

Both products can be connected to the network in one of two ways:

  • By a 25-pin serial connection to a terminal server

  • By an Ethernet connection directly to a switch

Complete multi-session support is provided in both serial and network modes of operation.

Printing

The products support fast printing in Hindi and other Indian languages to all IR ticket and chart printers. Complete support for both ISCII 83 and ISCII 88 is provided. Printing to either the 9-pin auxiliary serial port or the 25-pin Centronics parallel port is supported. External printer switches connected to the Centronics port are also supported.

Display

The products support 15.6" wide or higher-resolution LCD monitors connected to the VGA port. Both 80-column and 132-column modes are supported in high resolution.

Keyboard

The dumb terminal comes with a DEC-style 105-key mechanical keyboard, mapped to the DEC 105-key layout. Programmable function key support is disabled.

Software Features

  • Supports local clock, calendar and calculator

  • The compact, read-only Linux-based firmware cannot be modified by the user