Evaluation of Indian Railway’s Supply Chain Parameters for Improved Sustainability Under Industry 4.0 Transformation: An Application of AHP and TOPSIS

Abstract

Indian Railways (IR) is India’s major public transportation system and one of the world’s largest and busiest rail networks. The Indian government is in charge of owning and running it. This paper presents an alternative approach to measuring the overall operational performance of the Indian Railway supply chain. The operation of Indian railways from a supply chain perspective needs to be analyzed to improve customer service and inventory management.Industry 4.0 is used for the easy processing of individual transportation components efficiently and safely. The study is useful for the Indian Railways because it enables the classification of various issues related to government procurement. A supply chain model is proposed to assess service expectations and quality. Various issues (such as the integration system, financial behavior, and management perspective) related to supply chain management have been identified, and various factors affecting availability, railway service quality, and reliability have been analyzed for managing its supply chain. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and TOPSIS have been used to examine inventory-related difficulties and make recommendations for the public procurement environment. The result of the AHP method showed that Model 1 (Integration System) has the highest Max_C_weight of 0.5348, followed by Model 2 (Financial Behavior, 0.381695) and Model 3 (Management Perspective, 0.399443). The consistency ratio (CR) for all three models was also less than 0.1. Further, the TOPSIS method was used to validate the accuracy of AHP results and found that the model is significant. This result will help the decision-makers at Indian Railways design an assessment and relationship management model that will help them make procurement the driving force behind their supply chain.As per COP27, Industry 4.0 will help to achieve net zero emissions. The net carbon emissions will be reduced to zero, which will result in a clean environment.To improve sustainability within the framework of the Industry 4.0 transition, the research aimed to evaluate the Indian Railway’s supply chain metrics. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) are methodologies used in this assessment.

Keywords:

• Availability
• Indian Railway
• quality of railway service
• reliability
• supply chain management
• sustainability

EMJ Focus Areas:

• Strategic management
• supply chain management
• sustainability

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manoj Kumar

Manoj Kumar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Delhi Technological University, Delhi, India. His research area is supply chain management. His research on the improvement of the Indian railway supply chain system. He is also working at ABES Engineering College, Ghaziabad, India, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an assistant professor. He earned a master’s degree in manufacturing technology and automation. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. His working experience is more than 15 years in teaching. He has published more than 18 research papers in journals. He is a reviewer for journals. He is a lifelong member of the Indian Institution of Industrial Engineering (IIIE).

Vipin

Vipin is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Delhi Technological University, Delhi, India. He earned a bachelor of engineering, a master of technology, and a PhD. His research area is production engineering. He has more than forty-four research papers in journals and more than thirty-two research papers at international conferences. He is working on several projects. He is a guiding research scholar. He is a reviewer for journals. He has guided more than ten research scholars.

Ashish Agarwal

Ashish Agarwal has been working as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the School of Engineering & Technology at Indira Gandhi National Open University New Delhi India since 1993. He has earned his PhD from IIT Delhi in the area of Supply Chain Management. His papers have been published in International and National Journals. He has published his research papers in the European Journal of Operational Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, Work Study, International Journal of Management Science and Engineering Management, Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, International Journal of Intelligent Enterprise, Production & Manufacturing Research, International Journal of Advanced Operations Management, Competitiveness Review, International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Productivity, Industrial Engineering Journal and Global Journal of Enterprise Information System. He is a reviewer in International and National Journals. He has supervised nine PhD students in the area of Operations Management. He is at present supervising five PhD students. He is life member of the Indian Society for Technical Education and Indian Institutions of Industrial Engineering.