The UIC Digital Days were successfully held on 3 and 4 October 2019 at UIC Headquarters. Organised by the UIC Digital Platform and co-sponsored by MERMEC and Dassault Systems, this event was attended by some 100 participants over the two days, with some 20 high-level speakers.
The major issues and major trends such as big data, digital modelling, digital twins, quantum computing including cyber-security were discussed during this third edition. The opening speech was delivered by UIC Director General François Davenne followed by Gianluigi Castelli, FS Chairman and UIC President, who delivered a keynote.
During an Executive round table, Eugenio Fedeli, Evgeny Charkin, Björn Westerberg and Francisco Cardoso Dos Reis presented the digital strategy of their companies, the role of digitalisation as a new element of competitiveness for the rail industry, its impacts on the different procedures and the use of new technologies to reduce operations and maintenance costs.
The importance of the UIC Digital Platform was discussed as a place to share best practice, with attendees from all around the world sharing different experiences and expertise to go beyond rail. The importance of culture and recruitment of talented students and new skills such as data mining and big data analysis and changing the old image of the railways and making it more attractive for young people was discussed as one of the essential pre-requisites of digitalisation.
In the first session, the speakers outlined the role of IoT, big data and digital twins in predictive maintenance and improving the efficiency of operations. Dassault Systems presented their 3DExperience platform, the capabilities of the platform and the different use cases such as DIGIM II-connected level crossing. Further presentations were delivered by SNCF Réseau about using digital twins for complex mass transit system design integration.
Alain Jeanmaire (UIC) presented the “OntoRail” project as a common digital dictionary which involves all current projects for digital standardisation and their stakeholders. Bertrand Minary (SNCF Fret) presented reinventing rail freight with lean digitalisation; he mentioned the importance of digitalisation as a key to achieving the goal of 30% of rail freight in 2030, presenting the successful experience of SNCF in the Digital Freight Train. Luca Carotti (MERMEC) presented the impressive MERMEC/Almaviva asset digitalisation and monitoring system and explained the procedure to design a digital model and its advantages.
The second day focused on the enablers to the new digital systems, knowledge management and artificial intelligence and their use in maintenance, e-ticketing and traffic management.
The second session began with a keynote by Evgeny Charkin followed by the presentations of Matteo Pertosa from SITAEL, Luca Mariorenzi ( FSTechnology - UIC Chairman Passenger Technical Group) introducing major digital innovations in the area of passengers. Thomas Chatelet (ERA) underlined the importance of cybersecurity in rail, Hirotaka Yokouchi from JR West shared the Usage of Vision System Technology in maintenance systems, Amir Levintal from CYLUS presented detecting cyber threats in rail signalling and onboard networks and Rokia Belkebir from ONCF presented Digital Transformation and ONCF’s adopted strategy.
In the third session Evgeny Charkin presented artificial intelligence technologies on Russian Railways; Didier Guillonnet presented semantic web from Inter-Linked Data to Computer Reasoning; Jonathan Partouche from ORIGONE shared a real rail use case of AI-empowered by Quantum Computing and Lucas Philibert from SNCF introduced “OpenGov”, a digital approach for traffic management in stations in real time.
The meeting was concluded by Evgeny Charkin and Francis Bédel who thanked the participants and speakers for their interesting discussions and exchanges, assuming that this third edition of UIC Digital Days had allowed to share, to open and to connect.
