The Indian Railways is looking to adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a big way in the coming times. The national transporter recently announced that it would invest in AI and data analytics to better their operational efficiency. For capacity building and data analysis, it has tied up with the Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business, shared Railway Board Chairman V K Yadav. The national body will also set up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for the same purpose in the coming three months.

“We have passengers-related data, train operations-related data, freight data and even asset-related data. We want to analyse all this data with the help of AI and analytics and use it in our Passenger Reservation System (PRS), the introduction of new trains and even predictive asset maintenance,” Yadav said.

ISB will design and introduce an initial capacity building program for the staff. In addition, it will also research and report on the industrial practices of AI in railway transport and prepare the necessary benchmarks. To create a sustainable model, ISB will also create a report for establishing the CoE and design advanced capacity-building courses for the Railways staff.

Meanwhile, 88 railway employees have already been trained in the past two months for the same purpose, with more training in the pipeline in the near future, for every zone and division. The staff has been trained in cloud computing, data science, big data analytics, AI using reinforcement learning and AI for autonomous vehicles.

Every zonal Railway will be appointed a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) whose purpose will be to be abreast of all emerging technologies in data analytics and AI and adopt the needed tech into the system for constant improvement. In addition to the CTOs, assistant CTOs will be appointed across divisions, which will directly report to the General Manager and Divisional Railway Managers respectively.

Six to ten officers in divisions and about 20 in zonal headquarters will be identified for training in data analytics and AI. They will be formally trained in institutes like IITs, ISB, IIMs, IIIT in data analytics and AI.

The Railways is also looking at the development of data sharing protocols with the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), RailTel and others, they added.