An Efficient Auction Based TATKAL Scheme for Indian Railway

Indian Railways have one of the biggest infrastructures in terms of number of Express trains run per day across cities . It is comparable to any railways in the world. For each Express train there is a "TATKAL" scheme that reserves few seats on emergency basis. In the existing scheme for each seat a ticket is issued after charging a fixed price. However, for different distance different fixed price is charged. The allocation of tickets are purely based on the first-come-first-serve basis. But from our experience we have seen that the urgency of a person standing in the queue may be much more than any other person in front of him and that person is ready to pay a higher price than the fixed one to get the ticket, in case the tickets are exhausted before his turn coming. So, since the Indian railways charge a fixed price, they lose a significantly large amount of revenue as a considerable number of travelers may be willing to pay a much higher price than the fixed price for an assured reservation. In this paper we have proposed an auction based truthful mechanism for selling some tickets of TATKAL scheme and have shown that our auction based scheme is significantly better than the existing scheme in terms of the total income earned per annum. Our scheme could be applied in any railway system.