Project positions available in IEOR (Interested students enrolled in programmes at IIT Bombay can also apply)
IEOR students and faculty have been working on railway operations management problems for a long time. The attempt encompasses section capacity planning, timetabling, rolling stock management and related areas.
There are ongoing projects with RDSO (Research Design and Standards Organization – the R and D arm of Indian Railways), DST (and the German equivalent of DST, i.e. DFG), Tata Consultancy Services and also operating arms of Indian Railways from time to time.
Theory, modeling, software deployment, and practical implementations are all possible, depending on the interests of students. Students with some interest in programming, especially Java, and use of software for analysis and visualization are especially encouraged to apply. This rich domain permits interesting studies in many areas of O.R. and Industrial Engineering.
IIT Bombay has a Java simulator for modeling rail traffic on sections (typical rail sections on Indian Railways). This has been used for some specific sections (e.g. Mumbai suburban section).
Some objectives in the current phase of these projects - till March 2014
Task 1) To help build a software tool that will effectively capture train movement behaviour and analyse section performance for different traffic patterns.
Task 2) To gain on-field experience in railway systems and understand railway operations through interaction with railway officials, and incorporate the field data into analysis. (This task may be done during month of December)
Task 3) To scale up models of rail planning and control from (linear) sections to small networks and eventually to large networks.
There are other project areas to do with Railway operations such as Timetabling, Pricing and Locomotive/rolling stock management.
Interested students should send email to narayan.rangaraj@iitb.ac.in