E-Ticketing System Case Study

The previous system had been designed in 2002 and scaled for 10 years, but could no longer meet growing demand. In 2013 railway management decided it was time to re-architect the e-ticketing system to better manage existing e-ticket sales, minimize impact on counter sales and accommodate future growth and hired the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) to complete the work.
Solution
Engineering for High Concurrency with Distributed In-Memory Database
CRIS experts had already determined that simply adding new hardware would not solve performance issues. They designed a completely new application but realized they also needed to incorporate technology that would enable the new e-ticketing system to manage huge concurrent workloads, migrate 3 million users and provide dynamic load balancing to seamlessly manage demand at peak hours.

Now, user authorization and checkpoints are implemented from memory, streamlining the entire user log-in process. And, the new e-ticketing system offers passengers the choice of 40-50 payment gateways linked to banks when booking tickets. Further, because performance is so stable, almost 50 percent of ticket transactions take less than a second to complete.
Shifted Online Purchasing from 50% of Tickets Sold to 65%, Boosting Revenue Generated from E-ticket Sales to INR600 Million Daily
The CRIS team gives GemFire credit for helping to improve online revenue and minimize demand at railway station ticket counters. In the past, 10-20 percent of Tatkal tickets were booked using the e-ticketing system in the initial 10 minutes of Tatkal booking. Today, that percentage has grown to an estimated 60-80 percent of Tatkal tickets sold in this 10-minute period. Overall, online e-ticket sales have also increased from 50% to 65% of bookings, thus boosting daily revenue by INR$600 million for Indian Railways and CRIS expects this number to grow.