Program

The keynote describes the state of play and the perspectives for the implementation of AI in the European railway sector as perceived by the International Union of Railways (UIC). It will consider the European policy context of the railway sector in relation to AI (Sustainable and smart mobility strategy, strategy on AI and data), and the cost leadership strategy of the railway companies in relation to increasing competition. The speech will then describe how AI technologies are currently deployed in the railway sector and how they should be in the future, with examples concerning face recognition in the fight against terrorism, chatbots and virtual assistants for passengers, predictive maintenance, and other real-case scenarios.

Christian Chavanel is Director of the Rail System Department at International Union of Railways (UIC, Paris, France), the worldwide railway organisation, with 200 members, representing more than 2,5 billion passengers, +800.000 km of routes and +6 million rail staff. He is an engineer and a railway professional with more than 30 years of experience in international development, project management, operations, maintenance, safety, standardisation and regulatory affairs. He holds an MIT certificate in ‘Artificial Intelligence and its implications for Business Strategy’.

The electrification megatrend is driving the replacement of less efficient technologies and helping us achieve a more sustainable future. With the switch to power electronics, batteries, and electric machines of all sizes, it has become commonplace to deploy more and more embedded devices to control them. At the same time, with more access to data and computing power than ever before, machine learning is providing us with new ways to develop algorithms. When combined with ever more electronic, more programmable machines, we are facing the opportunity and the challenge to build increasingly autonomous systems. How can engineers architect such complex systems, iterate quickly, and validate their designs along the way? For many companies across industries, from renewable energies to mechatronics or transportation, the answer is Model-Based Design. In this presentation, we will look at how they are leveraging MATLAB®, Simulink® and domain-specific tools to model multidomain systems, validate their behavior, and deploy code for them. With such convergence of mechanics, electronics, and software, how must the skills of future engineers evolve? We will share examples of how leading universities around the world are adapting their curricula to include more active learning with professional tools to help their students gain interdisciplinary skills and systems thinking.

Carlos Sanchis holds master's degrees in Industrial Engineering (specializing in Electronics and Control) and in Project Management. In the last 13 years, he has worked at different organizations, applying MATLAB, Simulink and other technologies to different technical fields including power electronics, electrical grids modeling and data science. Today he’s a senior member of the Academic Group at MathWorks, where he collaborates with academics in Spain and Portugal on the use of technical computing and simulation to help make higher education and research successful.