LOCOMOTIVE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR SRI-LANKA GOVERNMENT RAILWAY DEPARTMENT

Abstract

Sri-lanka Railway Department (SLR) is only massive organization for rail transportation in the Island. Currently the department possesses more than three hundred locomotives belong to five running sheds. Since the establishment of the department all managerial and administrative works relevant to locomotives has been carrying out using paper based system which led to lot of inefficiencies in the department. Management and coordination of proper locomotive management is required to be perform between well established information flow mainly within three sub-department. Three sub-departments are Motive Power Sub-department which carrying out works regarding daily maintaining of locomotives and running repairing, loco rostering for daily train service, minor scheduling, runs under the directions of Chief Engineer Motive power. All five running sheds are controlled by this sub-department. Mechanical Sub-department is responsible for carrying out major repairing and overhaul repairing for all kinds of locomotives which is run under directions of Chief Mechanical Engineer. Monitoring of all trains with their locomotives running on rail road, and operations of all trains with monitoring delays are performing by Transportation Sub-department run under the supervision of Transportation Superintendent Railway. Presently, all communications and documentations are done by paper-based system. This paper-based system causes more inefficiencies and data redundancies in the department. Not only this, lack of proper and timely data flow between decision makers leads to taking of wrong decisions. If one decision maker require some crucial information to take timely, valuable decision he wants to refer more and more documents for information. Further he require to depend on others to find it. This will take more time. An introduction of Computer based Locomotive Management System will overcome these pitfalls and inefficiencies. This is web based system build according to three tier architecture. Bottom level users of the system require to enter relevant data instead of entering them on papers which are stored in database. All data are entered to the system will processed into valuable information and stored them for the retrieval of decision makers. The system is daily update with entering of current data. All five sheds, CE(M)'s department, CME's department, Running Sheds are situated in outstation, Transportation sub-department and main work shop at Ratmalana connected with this centralized system. According to this LMS any relevant officers in the department will able to retrieve timely information according to their needs using single button click using their own computers without depend on others and without referring more documents. Not only this, automatically processed data like graphs will provide good picture to come to an a valuable conclusion for decision makers at the moment of their information needs. Locomotive Management System is develop according to modified Waterfall model and LMS is built into three tier architecture using Apache Tomcat as application server. DBMS is MySql. Programming language is Java J2EE. Here use Java servlet technology and JSP as suitably. All programming is done using Eclipse as IDE.