The Fourth Ministerial Conference on Transport encouraged the implementation of a regional approach to sustainable multimodal freight transport in order to deepen freight sustainability in Asia and the Pacific. One of the priority areas of the regional approach is to increase the share of rail freight by means of digitalisation, among other things.
Accordingly, and with the support of the United Nations Development Account project on Enhancing Shift towards Sustainable Freight Transport in Asia and the Pacific, ESCAP organised a high-level regional conference on Accelerating Rail Digital Transformation with the following objectives:
- To deliberate on a regional strategy for accelerating rail digital transformation for more competitive rail transport including a way forward for its adoption.
- To share experiences of the challenges and emerging opportunities related to rail digitalisation.
- To identify key issues for landlocked and least developing countries for them to leapfrog to digital rail.
Together with ESCAP, UIC organised a joint UIC-ESCAP session on rail digitalisation, where UIC experts provided the following presentations:
- “Use of big data and analytics for rail” presented by Mr Christian Chavanel, Director of Railway System
- “ESCAP-UIC joint capacity building on accelerating rail digital transformation in ESCAP region” presented by Mr Philip Van den bosch, Deputy Director Freight
- “Digital rail communication technologies – UIC’s FRMCS” presented by Mr Guillaume Gach, FRMCS Design Authority
- “Optimising rail timetabling” presented by Mr Marc Guigon, Passenger Director
UIC participated in this important and interesting conference which has shown that digitalisation is making good progress, particularly in the field of platforms and Artificial Intelligence and, at the same time, is facing challenges such as developing costs, data quality, training, and expertise/capacity building.
