For students interested in a BTP in the year 2014-2015
* I am spending time mostly on projects to do with railways, transport and infrastructure, so ideas in these areas will get first priority. Within this, railway problems will receive further attention, as I am doing a couple of projects with them.
* Some data is available through timetables and operating documents of railways. Timetables of airlines are often available publicly and can be the first source of information. Ability to read those documents and infer something about services offered, service levels to customers, fleet assignment, etc. would be an asset.
* There is a huge literature in the area and any ideas derived from the literature, and possible applicability to problems that you have access to, are also welcome.
* I will not be able to spend too much time, and independent work, teamwork with other students, your own problem descriptions and solution approaches and self driven efforts are most welcome. I will be happy to share the credit if I am able to understand and give some useful inputs, but otherwise you are welcome to take the credit, publish your work, get good grades, put things on your CV and learn something largely on your own!
* I commit to reading and approving a problem description, reading an interim report, and a draft report before your final report submission and attending your final presentation and giving you a grade. Anything else has to be driven by you, through frequent emails, updates, seeking meetings, sharing work done by you and your own enthusiasm.
* Courses which you may consider doing are IE 502, IE 504, IE 716 and other such courses. Please see
for course descriptions.
* Pl send an email with your suggested ideas, after reading this. I will try to add some project suggestions here.
Narayan Rangaraj
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Project idea 1
Building a prototype for crew rostering for long distance railway crew (i.e. locomotive pilots and guards). This involves understanding the constraints of crew who operate passenger as well as freight trains and building a simple, implementable system for crew to sign up for duties and be able to plan their leave, up to one or two months ahead of the duty period. It involves interacting with the railway personnel who plan such activities, modeling such constraints and building a small software prototype for the purpose.
Project idea 2
Platform allocation chart at major stations. This involves understanding the constraints and considerations for allocating platforms for passenger trains at major stations, e.g. Secunderabad station, and building a logic for doing this on a systematic basis, with given timetable information (i.e. arrival and departure times). The dynamic version of this (i.e. how to do it when there is late running of trains) is a challenging problem.