Railway

Rail transport meets the environmental requirements of the future, but faces competition from autonomous cars, carpooling and air transport. AKKA’s experts are convinced that digital technologies will enable the rail sector to improve its appeal and capacity, especially when fully integrated in the design, operation and maintenance phases.

The first people to benefit from these developments will be rail passengers, for whom transport services will be greatly improved: more accurate scheduling, easier ticketing, increasingly reliable on-board connectivity and real-time passenger information (delays, connections, advertising) in stations as well as on board the trains.

With regard to trains and infrastructure, innovation will focus on control systems and communication with signaling systems in order to fully automate the railway sector and improve traffic flows. The challenge for the future relates to the volume of data exchanged and exploited, including information about location and weather conditions.

Finally, with the deployment of railway infrastructure in China and India, we believe digitalization will provide significant operational advantages. Inspections over large areas (which are sometimes difficult to access) will be facilitated by the use of robots, predictive maintenance will enable robotic repairs, and speed and energy consumption will be optimized thanks to better system-wide integration.