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“AI holds transformative potential for the railway industry, offering improvements across various domains. One domain ripe for AI-enabled transformation is rail asset management. With the right mix of insight, expertise, and tools, their use of AI can become incredibly transformative – building a foundation that will reshape rail asset management. Learn how Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) uses cameras to visually inspect critical components and AI to gauge wear and tear. This helps SBB minimize unplanned maintenance outages, so passengers get where they want to go on time and safely.”

• Understanding what data streams we have, what is currently available within the industry, how do we collect, analyse, and manipulate data to use for an intervention or a prevention.
• Taking advantage of the granularity of information and frequency of data sources within current systems, developing further insights to improve reliability and availability in maintenance.
• implementing low-cost strategies to collect and analyse legacy data for current rail assets how are operators delivering improvements in operations without further investment in technology.
• What are the limitations on collecting data from legacy assets operators currently operate, inherent constructional challenges with the design of the fleet and cost of processing data.

• Application of digital twin in fleet maintenance, what type of sensors and evaluation of real time data do operators require for predictive maintenance and examples of comprehensive rollouts.
• What technologies are operators buying or developing internally to assist in rolling stock maintenance, how is technology helping to reduce the cost of ownership?
• Constructing the internal processes to manage and interpret the data from new digital systems, developing new internal structures and upskilling the workforce to maximise your investments.
• Making the step from proof of concepts to actual full-scale implementation, delivering end to end of implementation of new technologies related to maintenance.

Field Service Management & AI-assisted Visual Inspection

• Contribution of the maintenance organization to the operational performance of the train, does the maintainer have the best competence or access to the train to deliver the right intervention.
• Understanding the limitations and challenges the inherent constructional quality and design of the train might provide in restricting improvements in performance and reliability in older fleets.
• Collaborating with suppliers and other operators to find new strategies and approaches to improve availability and reliability during lifetime operations.
• What components are operators exchanging to deliver an additional 10-15 years of reliability in older fleets, delivering customer satisfaction and improved performance on legacy trains?
• How can operators better organize their maintenance organization to allow engineers more time to make change requests and maintenance modifications without bypassing safety regulations?
• Improving forecasting for obsolete computer and software parts on-board rolling stock, reducing the operator vulnerability of trains being put of service for a lack of parts.

• Addressing the skills shortage in the industry, what are the short-term challenges to maintaining the current levels of maintenance.
• How do you encourage young people to come into the industry, what skills do they need when they come into rail and can they develop a clear career path in rail
• Balancing the requirements of digitally skilled engineers with the need for mechanically skilled engineers, how do operators cater for all the requirements within their engineering teams.
• How do you ensure your workforce is sufficiently trained and skilled to work with contemporary technology
• Using digitalization to address the organizational challenge of succession planning.to improve knowledge retention in rail maintenance.

• What are the practical challenges by either third party or outsource maintenance, and how best can the industry resolve these issues, examining the operator and maintainer point of view?
• Improving collaboration and the contractual processes to meet operators’ priorities and obligations and ensure operators have the required information needed to operate safely and legally.
• Planning to succeed, making sure third-party maintenance agreements are meeting the goal of ensuring a train that’s fit for the customer.
• Best practice between operators and maintainers to improve visibility of the full defect status of a fleet presented for service, building confidence in the relationship to drive maintenance growth

AI-assisted Visual Inspection

• How are operators finding innovative ways to do condition assessment of their components to ensure they are still fit for purpose, building proactive maintenance strategies to enhance reliability?
• Strategies for optimizing maintenance plans to extend the maintenance regimes of all components and reduce material usage and cost in maintenance.
• What is the impact of digitalization of supply chain processes on sustainability in fleet maintenance? How are operators using data and digital tools to drive improvements and reduce waste in the supply chain?
• Improving obsolescence and the lack of standardization, working with supplier and OEMs to standardize platforms and parts in every generation of train platforms to reduce cost in rail.

• Examine why closer engagement and sharing of data with academia and SME’s benefits not just the rail industry but also research, academia, and has a wider impact to the education system?
• Working with academia to improve cost benefit analysis of digital projects in rail, understanding the challenges and developing strategic approaches to realizing the return on investment.
• Creating an industry data sharing platform with suppliers to share challenges, directing suppliers where they should focus their innovation, moving towards addressing more challenges.
• How do suppliers validate new solutions and technologies reduce the cost of ownership, creating value for customers or improving safety for employees to meet basic requirements
• What are the challenges for suppliers interfacing with multiple stakeholders to deliver solutions for rolling stock, who makes the investment in terms of digital services for the future?

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