China is using artificial intelligence (AI) in the operation of its 45,000 km high-speed rail network, with the technology achieving several milestones, according to engineers involved in the project. An AI system in Beijing is processing vast amounts of real-time data from across the country and can alert maintenance teams of abnormal situations within 40 minutes, with an accuracy as high as 95%, they said in a peer-reviewed paper. “This helps on-site teams conduct inspections and repairs as quickly as possible,” wrote Niu Dao'an, Senior Engineer at the China State Railway Group’s Infrastructure Inspection Center, in the paper published by the academic journal China Railway. In the past year, none of China’s operational high-speed railway lines received a single warning that required speed reduction due to major track irregularities, while the number of minor track faults decreased by 80% compared to the previous year.
Machine intelligence can predict and issue warnings before problems arise, enabling precise and timely maintenance that keeps the infrastructure of high-speed rail lines in better condition than when it was first built, according to the researchers. Niu and his team said the significant amount of data generated by the sensors embedded in high-speed rail infrastructure was “forcing China to adopt new technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence”. The adoption of these technologies allowed for “more precise and timely assessments and scientific evaluations of the infrastructure”, they said. After years of effort, Chinese railway scientists and engineers have “solved challenges” in comprehensive risk perception, equipment evaluation, and precise trend predictions in engineering, power supply and telecommunications. The result was “scientific support for achieving proactive safety prevention and precise infrastructure maintenance for high-speed railways”, the engineers said.
Before construction began on China’s first high-speed rail line 15 years ago, critics argued that maintenance would become an unbearable burden as wires and rails inevitably aged. By the end of last year, the network surpassed the length of the equator, posing an engineering and technological challenge to maintain its safe operation. China’s high-speed rail is the fastest in the world, operating at 350 km/h, with plans for an increase next year to 400 km/h. The network is expected to continue its rapid expansion until it connects all cities with populations over 500,000.
To meet the need for extensive real-world data to train the AI system, Chinese railway scientists and engineers collected and organized nearly 200 terabytes of raw data for AI – more than 10 times the entire data volume of the U.S. Library of Congress. While the AI technology gap between China and the U.S. appears to be widening, some observers suggest it is actually narrowing and that there may be Chinese breakthroughs in certain critical areas using smaller, specialized models, the South China Morning Post reports.
