The Indian Railways has introduced the ‘Ideal Train Profile’ to maximize the capacity utilization and revenue generation in reserved mail express trains by regularly analyzing the demand pattern of every single train.  

It has successfully concluded the trial of the AI program it built to fix a perennial issue, the long waiting lists of tickets. It is expected that the utility will also help to enhance confirmed seat availability and increase train occupancy by up to 5%. 

In a statement, a railway ministry official said that the pattern of demand for accommodation is not always on an end-to-end basis but rather varies in all trains depending on variables such as its origin-destination pairs, timings, class of accommodation, availability of alternate trains or means of transportation.  

Traditionally, this is done on Indian Railways by analyzing the historical data of a particular train or similar trains operating on a given route. However, the official informed that the deployment of Ideal Train Profile utility provides the railway administrators in the passenger profile cells in various zonal railways a decision support tool to shorten the time taken for seat distribution analytics of a train.  

The pilot project was started on seven zonal railways- Eastern, Central, Northern, Southern, South Central, Western and West Central Railway. The pilot project has been rolled out in over 200 trains in Indian Railways. 

The Ideal Train Profile- a seat capacity optimization decision support is done since the number of ticket-class combinations on a single train journey date can exceed Rs. 5000.