Hitachi Rail Shares Vision for Scalable Industrial Autonomy at NVIDIA GTC Panel
Company's advanced digital solutions, including its HMAX for Rail suite which leverages NVIDIA computing, are helping to optimize public transport assets and support growing passenger demand.
www.hitachirail.com
Hitachi Rail yesterday outlined its vision for scalable, industrial autonomy at NVIDIA GTC. Joining a panel chaired by Deepu Talla, NVIDIA's VP of Robotics and AI, Hitachi Rail's, Chief Technology & Innovation Officer, Mariella Guerricchio underlined the transformative potential of Hitachi Rail's AI powered technologies to optimize entire railway systems.
The panel session, titled 'The Future of Industrial Autonomy', explored how advanced AI and edge computing are reshaping industrial and healthcare systems, and the pathways to deploying them at scale.
Contextualising the landscape, Guerricchio highlighted the potential and the challenges of deploying AI at scale within the railway's ecosystem. A railway system generates huge amounts of data creating multiple opportunities for autonomous operations and self-optimizing railway networks. Many networks, though, are as much as 50-100 years old and granting digital retrofitting and interoperability is often complicated; while, deploying AI on a safety critical system requires very careful evaluation.
Orchestrated through its Digital & AI Center Of Excellence, Hitachi Rail is pioneering solutions to meet these challenges, both in terms of increasing edge processing capacity and reliability with AI enhanced solutions; and, by optimizing the performance of entire railway systems through HMAX for Rail, its digital asset management suite of solutions.
HMAX digitizes railway operations and maintenance processes by integrating and harmonizing data from across the railway – trains, signaling systems and infrastructure. This data is generated by Hitachi proprietary sensors, rail operators' core systems, and through digital twins that leverage powerful computing technologies such as NVIDIA IGX Thor, alongside other hyperscalers' AI technologies. HMAX extracts knowledge from the data and applies it to achieve operational advancements including automated train operation (such as operation of doors, HVAC, and other systems), energy consumption reduction and predictive maintenance processes.
Summing up, Guerricchio outlined how Hitachi Rail will harness industrial autonomy to meet new demands: "Our powerful digital solutions are enabling us to learn from both real-world and synthetic data, speeding up development time, while retaining and enhancing the reliability and quality of railway systems. We are ready to meet the changing requirements of the mobility market with solutions that can balance the need of AI powered digital technologies and regulatory compliance, in order to increase service capacity and optimize the entire railway system."
www.hitachirail.com
