Hitachi Partners With Nvidia to Launch AI-Powered Railway Service

The Japanese company Hitachi launched a new AI-powered railway maintenance service in partnership with the tech giant Nvidia.

According to Nvidia, Hitachi—which operates railway systems in more than 50 countries— will use its NVIDIA IGX platform to analyze data from its new HMAX asset manager. The new HMAX uses sensors and cameras to gather operational data and now with the AI technology integration the companies expect to reduce train idling time, and maintenance costs for rail operators, and improve transit reliability for customers.

“Using previous digital monitoring systems, it would take a few days to process the data and discover issues that need attention,” said Koji Agatsuma, executive director and chief technology officer of rail vehicles at Hitachi Rail. “If we can instead conduct real-time prediction using NVIDIA technology, that enables us to avoid service disruptions and significantly improve safety, reliability and operating costs.”

HMAX technology is currently gathering data from 2,000 trains—about 8,000 train cars—and each Hitachi Rail train could have around 50,000 data points as it does in the U.K. All this information usually takes days to process, and with the new NVIDIA technology, the companies expect to get analysis within seconds for real-time solutions and optimization.

According to Kyoto News, Hitachi is already deploying the new AI technology in routes in Italy and Britain. “We believe AI has immediate and very impactful applications that will make railways run more efficiently,” said Hitachi Rail Chief Executive Officer Giuseppe Marino at InnoTrans.

Nvidia keeps building new alliances with its AI technology. It also partnered with Richtech Robotics a few days ago to launch the bartender robot Scorpio.