As the Indian government plans modernisation of railways, the government’s plans for the future of technology interactions within railways include internet of things (IoT), big data and artificial intelligence.

Speaking at an industry summit in Bhubaneswar, RailTel chairman and managing director Puneet Chawla said the Indian Railways will rely heavily on technology as it focusses on the satisfaction of employees and passengers as well as in train operations to ensure safety, punctuality and line capacity.

Chawla said that RailTel was the fifth-largest telecom infrastructure provider in the country and listed examples such as “video walls, WiFi, CCTVs, e-office and computer-based signalling used in railway operations”. He said the future of technological engagement with railways could include “IoT platforms, big data and artificial intelligence”.

The modernisation of Indian railways was part of BJP’s 2019 manifesto for Lok Sabha elections. Government think tank NITI Aayog is pushing for a comprehensive plan for the holistic development of the area around 50 railway stations with the biggest potential to draw private investments.

The cost of holistic development of railways stations in metro cities in India is pegged at about INR 10K Cr, while in Tier 2 cities, it is said to be between INR 3K Cr and INR 4K Cr. Over 1.4 Mn passengers use the Indian railway service every day, with over 71.42% of the tickets booked online.

Indian railways has been in revamp mode for years. Railway Minister Piyush Goyal had said that the government plans to bring 6.5K railway stations online through WiFi connections. The ministry has also expressed its intention to install CCTV cameras at the stations. At present,  5K stations across India are already equipped with WiFi facility.

The budget this year also emphasised on the new age technologies and its capacities. Presenting the budget, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented a new vision of the tech economy with patents, data centres, quantum technologies and connectivity.

“Artificial intelligence, Internet-of-Things (IoT), 3D printing, drones, DNA data storage, quantum computing, etc., are rewriting the world economic order,” Sitharaman said. She also noted that India has embraced these new technologies by sharing economy with aggregators that are displacing conventional businesses.

She added that the Indian government has harnessed the new age technologies to enable direct benefit transfers and financial inclusion on a “scale never imagined before”.

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Engineering and design company Klas Telecom is to launch a new deep learning computer vision solution for the railway industry.

The solution is due to be launched next week at the InnoTrans 2018 event in Germany.

Alongside providing deep learning computer vision, the solution will offer object detection capabilities to trains and the network edge.

The multiplatform solution is designed to enable railway network operators to deploy a number of applications, including video surveillance and smart cameras.

These applications are capable of replicating human vision and conducting various jobs such as vehicle identification, intruder detection and empty seat recognition to ultimately help improve safety, security and analyse risks.

In addition, the new solution features Klas Telecom TRX Connected Transportation Platform R6 (TRX R6), a router/server and six-modem cellular gateway device, and Intel OpenVINO convolutional neural networks (CNN). All of these features facilitate deep learning.

TRX R6 is designed to serve the railway communications systems market and is equipped with Intel CNN-based machine learning models, in a single 4.5kg, 250mm x 279mm x 76.5mm chassis.

The solution also complies with environmental standards for rail, as well as containing Intel Core i7, i5 and i3 processors and provides 32GB of RAM and up to 8TB of built-in storage.

Klas Telecom Transportation Business Development director Brendan Fleming said: “It is exciting to be able to bring artificial intelligence and machine learning into railway use cases such as traffic monitoring, vehicle identification, pedestrian identification, real-time risk analysis, security and passenger information services.

“It means our customers can save time by using computers to perform intelligent functions and predictive analysis. Ultimately, time means money and we hope to save our customers both.”

Klas Telecom currently has three offices in the US, with another in Dublin, Ireland.

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