Delhi: DMRC unveils new driver training system, monitoring mechanism

DMRC officials said that till now, the product was imported by the Metro from foreign manufacturers at a high cost

New Delhi: The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) on Monday unveiled a prototype of a new driver training and evaluation simulator -- the rolling stock driver training system (RSDTS) -- that officials said is a major step towards indigenising the technologies involved in operating the Metro.

DMRC officials said that the Metro has an ambitious plan to go digital for all its maintenance needs. (Sanchit Khanna/HT Archive)

Union ministry of housing and urban affairs secretary Durga Shanker Mishra also launched the Super Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, a monitoring mechanism to help identify maintenance periodicity, manpower requirements and management of spares, on Monday.

“This system (RSDTS) will also be used for evaluating the driving skills of a working train operator which is done periodically for safety considerations. This will be the first indigenously developed universal train driving simulator that can be suitably modified for any Metro system or Railways,” said Anuj Dayal, executive director, corporate communication, DMRC.

The system was developed in collaboration with Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), which had signed an MoU with DMRC in September last year, said officials. DMRC officials said that till now, the product was imported by the Metro from foreign manufacturers at a high cost.

“The designs available with DMRC so far are suitable for use with a single type of rolling stock, and signalling and line profiles envisaged at design stage… The RSDTS being developed indigenously has the facility of the same core software to be utilised for creating different combinations of rolling stock, signalling and line profiles, by merely changing the input data files, along with minor hardware changes in the driving desk, if required. This will enhance the flexibility of the training system and would result in major cost saving for DMRC, as the same system can be used for multiple stocks and different routes,” said Dayal.

Officials said that the Metro has an ambitious plan to go digital for all its maintenance needs, with the work on the Super SCADA system being an important step in this direction. “For this, DMRC had signed another MoU with BEL earlier in June this year for indigenous development of Super-SCADA,” said an official.