New Delhi, May 29: Much to the happiness of passengers travelling by train, the Indian Railways will now let them know if their waiting tickets has chances to get confirmed with the help of a new tool. The ‘wait list prediction’ tool will be made available for all the passengers from Tuesday for all bookings make through the IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) website.

The new tool introduced by the Indian Railways will help passengers to get the status of their waiting list ticket at the time of booking itself.  Passengers may not get confirmed berths each time they book a train ticket, but with the new service on IRCTC website, they will get to know their chances of getting one, officials were quoted by PTI.

One of the key advantages of the new feature is that a user need not even log in to the new website to enquire or search for trains and check on availability of seats, while the older version only allowed access to the registered users. According to reports, the idea came from railway minister Piyush Goyal, who had given a one-year deadline last year to complete the process of inducting the predictive service on the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website.

The revamped IRCTC website went live and has a lot of new features. One of them is that the passengers will now know the probability of confirmation of wait-listed tickets, based on a new algorithm developed by the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS). About 13 lakh tickets are booked on the IRCTC website every day against a reserved accommodation of 10.5 lakh berths.

"According to the new feature of wait-list prediction, one can predict the chances of a wait-listed or an RAC ticket getting confirmed on the basis of booking trends. We will mine our own data of passenger operations and booking patterns for the first time," a senior official in the railway ministry was quoted by PTI. The official further added that the algorithm will take into account last 13 years' data to arrive at a "robust, workable model".

There have been many private players who have used the predictions tool but the tool that has been introduced by the Indian Railways system is believed to be more reliable as it would have the advantage of the database of the national transporter.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 29, 2018 04:32 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).