Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

The 5^th International Railway Summit is being held in Kuala Lumpur for the first time by lasting from the 15^th till the 17^th of November at the Shangri-La. It attracted nearly 200 delegates from global vendors, industry leaders, rail operators and experts during the event.

The railway transportation has grown in leaps and bounds with the advent of Big Data and IoT. It has disrupted how railway companies look at simple maintenance issues to more complex situations where end point data is streamed every second across hundreds of thousands of kilometres of track, keeping the railway companies informed on the track and train conditions.

During the Summit, Huawei showcased its Digital Railway and Digital Urban Rail solutions, as well as end-to-end ICT solutions tailored to rail operational communication. Working with a number of partners, such as Jiaxun Feihong, Top Xingda, and Singapore’s ST Electronics, Huawei also displayed the Railway IoT and Urban Rail Cloud solutions based on the latest cloud computing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, as well as how these solutions drive the Digital Transformation of the rail sector.

Norman Frisch, Business Development Transport Solutions at Huawei says “The digital transformation, what it actually means is that, we are moving from what used to be technology that’s placed in silos, in different departments, and moving that into a cloud based solution which can be shared to other railways. This is a very important part of the transformation to open up technology and resources from your own organization and to share with others.”

He goes on to explain that with cloud sharing and IoT streaming data from the track. He shared a use case where a rail company has a network of 34,000 kilometres of track, 290,000 employees an spend about 2 billion Euros a year on maintenance.

“Just to save ½ a percent by this technology, will be a huge savings. This is where IoT becomes important. Railway operators today, operate wireless communications and the key problem for IoT was and still is, how to get the information from the meter back to the center.”

He explained that if they used cables or modems to transfer the information, it would either cost a lot of money for laying the cables or providing the power supply.

But with technology improving he says, they are moving from 2G to 4G based solutions.

“With this, you open communication with so called narrowband. So you have a wireless connectivity with the remote sensors,” he said adding that railway operators will then extract the data, preempt maintenance, by detecting where the fault in equipment or infrastructure may lie. This is one of the key areas where IoT comes in very to play an important role.

To a question about how will commuters benefit from the use of Big Data railway systems, Dr Marc Antoni responded saying that on board, the commuter will have more access and information from the operators and the destination and other information for which the commuter might request.

“You will have a lot of progress for ticketing. It will be more easy to buy your ticket from your telephone or IPad.” He added that an extra service is assisting blind people through IoT. He ventured that perhaps this service could also be used and upgraded by the operator to assist able bodied commuters as well in getting to their destination quickly and efficiently with minimal delay.

Etienne Saclier D’Arquian, Head of ICS Networks Product Line, Thales Ground Transportation Systems, said: “With a significant legacy field equipment fleet to maintain, Railway operators will find IoT is a key enabler for cost savings, thanks to improved operational efficiency. Thales helps them reach this objective by combining proven transportation business expertise with best-in-class AI and versatile solutions such as Huawei’s, to build flexible, resilient and secure IoT services for predictive maintenance.”

(0)(0)