Context: Recently, the Prime Minister has inaugurated the country’s first fully automated Metro, (Driverless Metro) on Delhi Metro’s Magenta Line.
Key Facts
- Delhi driverless Metro train: It will be rolled out on the 38-km Line 8 or Magenta Line of the Delhi Metro which has a 390-km-long network spread across the national capital and adjoining cities.
- Significance: After this inauguration, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has entered the elite league of 7% of the world’s Metro networks which can operate without drivers.
How will it benefit the citizens?
- Operational flexibility & efficiency
- Inspection/testing to be done remotely ensuring Higher reliability with no human intervention
- Improved safety and quality of service
- Save Train Operators’ time & effort and improve the quality of his/her job.
What does Driverless Metro Train mean?
- Driverless technology does not mean that there will be no driver – at least that is not going to be the case to begin with. It does mean though that slowly the role of the driver will get more and more limited as the technology and its systems expand.
Grades of Automation: The driverless train technology has set standards for automation known as Grades of Automation(GoA).
- In GoA 1, the train is run by one driver.
- In GoA 2 and GoA 3, the driver only needs to operate doors and take over if there is an emergency.Trains start and stop in automated mode in GoA2 & 3.
- The last level is GoA 4, where trains run on complete unattended mode.