TOUR PLANNING IN GIS

Abstract

Mankind from the ancient time is travelling by nature for better livelihood, business or recreational purposes. Earlier modes of transportation were sea route for inter continental travel and road for inter state travel. Now a day's technology provides many options to travel from one point to another on the globe, such as Roadway, Railways, Waterways and Airways. In India for long distance travel, Railways are popular mode of transportation. Indian Railways are second largest railway network in the world. For easy operation and management, Indian. Railway is divided in to 15 zones and each zone manages its own local affair. When a person wants to travel from one place to another place by train, he has to do tour planning for example: the shortest route, minimum time or cost effective route and the detailed information of trains operating in the route, for the comfort of his journey. Railways publish Time Table giving details of trains operating between different stations, train-timings etc., but these Railway Time Tables are not user friendly and the person has to refer number of tables depending on the starting station and destination station. In this scenario a user interactive Railway Time Table Information System (RTTIS) is necessary to assist an ordinary person. RTTIS has to manage a huge volume of data of the information given in different tables depending on the main route and link route. The information contains train name, train no, starting time etc and the railway map. This can be effectively handled by GIS (Geographical Information System). GIS packages are designed as open system. There are limited queries available in GIS; however the open systems can be customized for a particular application using the inbuilt modular languages or standard programming languages such as Visual Basic or Visual C++. RTTIS is a specific application, hence it is planned to customize the GIS software using standard programming language (Visual Basic) to serve the required purpose. In the present work GIS has been used to create digital Railway map and to link database of Railway Time Table. It has been customised to display Railway Time Table and shortest route interactively.