IRISET to host ‘Kavach’ - indigenous Automatic Train Protection system’s centre of excellence

HYDERABAD

Indian Railways Institute of Signal Engineering & Telecommunications (IRISET) in Secunderabad will be housing a ‘Centre of Excellence’ for ‘Kavach’ — the indigenously developed Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system — with the Railway Board granting ₹34 crore for training and developing on the technology to be adopted across high density traffic routes in the country for enhanced speeds and safety.

The institute, which celebrated the 65st founding day on Thursday, has already commenced training of the railway personnel on ‘Kavach’ developed by RDSO (Research Design Standards Organisation) with South Central Railway (SCR) being chosen as the first implementing agency for testing of the technology.

It is being run successfully across 300 km route here and the installation has touched 1,500 km and soon this is expected to be taken nationwide. “IRISET can, in fact, become the centre for convergence of signalling and communication with the Indian Railways moving towards communication based signalling with remote trouble shooting and interconnectivity. Hence, it is necessary for our personnel to melt the boundaries between both streams in training,” said Railway Board Addl Member (Signal) Rahul Agarwal.

The ‘Kavach’ lab at the institute has trained about 364 personnel in the last one year and has equipment of the approved manufacturers. It also has a Network Monitoring System (NMS) to monitor the working of the equipment from a centralised location to initiate action in case of a failure.

The experiment for interfacing Kavach with electronic interlocking systems available at stations has been a recent successful initiative while the integration with LTE wireless mobile broadband communications technology 4G/5G is under progress, said senior faculty member C. Neelakanta Reddy.

IRISET Director-General Sudhir Kumar said work on the proposed new centre work would begin soon. A memorandum of understanding was signed with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to take up railway signal engineering courses and especially ‘Kavach’ with five engineering colleges joining including NIT-Warangal.

The institute had trained one lakh personnel since inception by March 2002 and completed one lakh trainee days for the second successive year, he said. From four faculty and 70 trainees, it had grown to 46 faculty and 6,700 trainees a year on its 70 acre campus equipped with modern classrooms.