Grab the tickets! How will 12306 face the "big test"?

"This year's Spring Festival travel season will start on January 14 and end on February 22, a total of 40 days." At a press conference held by the State Council Information Office on January 8, Li Chunlin, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that this year's railway passenger volume is expected to exceed 510 million, a record high. People who are looking forward to going home for the New Year have been gearing up to buy tickets in the past few days.

The 12306 system is also in a state of preparation. This world's largest real-time ticketing transaction system is about to face its annual test.

Shan Xinghua, deputy director of the Science and Technology Innovation Center of Railway 12306, recently introduced how 12306 serves everyone at the "Beichen Dialogue" event at the China Science and Technology Museum. The predecessor of 12306 was the ticket system version 1.0, which was built in 1996. Through the transformation from manual ticket sales to computer ticket sales, it realized "one window has a ticket, every window has a ticket". After 15 years and 5 versions of iterations, the system has gradually realized regional networking, national networking, train-wide shared ticket sales and other functions.

On June 12, 2011, the 12306 Internet ticketing system was put into use. Since then, a series of core technology breakthroughs have made it possible for passengers to buy tickets online smoothly: distributed memory computing technology to calculate remaining tickets; asynchronous transaction queuing system to handle massive online requests; elastic computing architecture to improve transaction capabilities; risk control platform to ensure stable operation.

"After 28 years of hard work, this transaction system now includes one national railway group center, 18 railway bureau centers, more than 3,000 stations, more than 30,000 automatic ticket vending machines, more than 70,000 ticket gates, and more than 100,000 handheld devices on trains." Shan Xinghua said that it is these complex nodes and networks that provide support for people's ticket purchase and travel services.

The scene of people queuing up at train stations all night to buy tickets has finally become history. Currently, 12306 has over 700 million registered users, over 400 million mobile APP installations, and a daily ticket sales capacity of over 20 million tickets.

In recent years, with the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, 12306 has also been actively improving its intelligent "superpowers": the ticket purchasing system supported by AI algorithms can accurately respond to peak demand and improve ticket purchasing efficiency; in stations, facial recognition can quickly complete identity verification, making travel more convenient; on trains, some intelligent services such as do-not-disturb ticket verification are also provided...

"The application of AI technology in the railway passenger transport system brings the public a safer, more efficient and comfortable travel experience," said Li Bohan, associate professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

It is understood that during this year's Spring Festival travel season, 12306 will provide some new services: opening a special service area for students and migrant workers; launching an optimization function for pre-filling ticket information, which is mainly aimed at passengers from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Jiangsu and Zhejiang traveling to Chengdu and Chongqing. They can submit pre-filled information outside the pre-sale period, and the system will automatically process it after payment.

Shan Xinghua reminded that during the Spring Festival travel season, if you see that 12306 has no tickets, you must wait, wait, and wait again. Because the 12306 system will collect and analyze the waiting data in a timely manner, dynamically allocate railway capacity and ticket resources, so that more people can buy tickets, take the train, and go home for the New Year.

(Popular Science Times reporter Chen Jie)