Pneumatic Door Operation System in Trains with Cogeneration

Global demand for transportation has exceeded the available capacity. In today's context of climate and pollution concerns, it is no longer possible to meet demands by increasing the physical capacity of transportation networks. Instead, we need more innovative solutions and this can be enabled by technology. The railway industry has embraced technology at a slower pace than other modes of transportation. Across most of the Americas, Europe, and Asia, planning and operating trains is still a human-intensive process. So the question is: can advanced control and automation deliver substantial benefits to railway operators? Historically, many transportation systems have been human intensive, but are benefitting from an amazing level of automation today. About 100 years ago, cars were steered using a tiller, and speed controlled by a hand-held throttle. The starter, carburettor, choke valve, were all manually operated. Today, most of these functions have been automated. With autonomous cars, almost incredibly, driving itself has been automated. As these cars become main stream, they will free up the chauffeur space (that is an increase in throughput) and also open our minds to the amazing possibilities of automation. As we understand the cause-effect relationship between the parts of a complex system, we can automate their operation. Railways are ready for such an evolution. Increasing railway infrastructure capacity is an expensive proposition, and doesn’t guarantee proportional increases in efficiency. Despite a 75 billion dollar investment in railways in the US between 2009 and 2013, the American Institute of Civil Engineers assessed railway infrastructure and graded it C+. A much cheaper alternative is to supplement existing infrastructure with advanced sense-analyse-control. In India, we know that the current dispatching methods draw upon over 100 years of organizational experience, and are as efficient as humanly possible – but the key word here is 'humanly'. The beauty of automation lies in always finding that last drop of performance that may be missed by an inexperienced, distracted, or tired human dispatcher. Our calculations show that extracting just 5-7% additional throughput from Indian Railways may be worth as much as 10,000 crore rupees in additional revenue.