How innovation and digitalization are shaping the world of transport

An efficient transportation infrastructure is essential for a society’s success and prosperity. Over the past decades, globalization has accelerated economic growth, and demands on transportation infrastructure have soared as more and more people travel and more and more goods need to be transported. There’s no end to this trend in sight, but there are solutions to master the transport challenges, based on great innovations and of course digitalization.

Let me tell you more. I’ve just returned from this year’s InnoTrans in Berlin, the world’s largest transport trade fair, where I got to talk to customers about their challenges and to our mobility experts about how to solve them. The theme of the Siemens Mobility booth was spot on: “Shaping connected mobility.” Digitalization and artificial intelligence are increasingly connecting people, assets and modes of transportation. It’s the key trend in this industry and indeed in other industries. Why now? Not because of the hype, but because of the ability of digital technologies to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing our customers now and in the future.

Let me give you some examples. As transport volumes grow, we need technologies that increase the capacity of our infrastructure – such as autonomous train operation which increases capacity on existing lines by up to 20 percent, and which, thanks to a Siemens Mobility innovation, now works on the basis of ETCS. We need technologies to operate our transportation infrastructure more efficiently and sustainably – such as interlocking in the cloud which enables (as will now happen in Norway) an entire country’s infrastructure to be run with just one interlocking. We need apps that enhance passenger experience when planning, booking, and making trips across different transport modes – such as the apps offered by our subsidiary Hacon that use the most advanced algorithms. We need more ecofriendly and sustainable drive systems – which we are developing on the basis of fuel cells. We need maintenance systems that guarantee the availability of our infrastructure – such as our Railigent application, powered by MindSphere, which uses artificial intelligence to predict malfunctions before they occur and guarantees 100 percent availability.

And of course we need trains – such as our new high-speed Velaro Novo, which attracted enormous attention at the fair. Not surprising when you consider… 30 percent less energy consumption, 30 percent lower maintenance costs, 20 percent less investment, 15 percent less mass, yet 10 percent more space. It’s what I’d call an operator’s dream in sustainability and efficiency, and I’m sure it will become many a passenger’s favored reality when it comes to comfort and travel experience.

 At Siemens Mobility we work hard to provide customers with answers to address the challenges they face with growing transportation volumes. With digitalization, we enable operators worldwide to make trains and infrastructure intelligent, increase value sustainably over the entire lifecycle, enhance passenger experience, and guarantee availability. And we do this together with our customers. Whether at the fair – where we held a number of co-creation workshops – or in our dedicated MindSphere Application Centers for Rail located close to customers. We work with customers to jointly develop use cases that address their concerns and unlock the full potential of their rail assets by combining data and domain knowhow and MindSphere, our operating platform for the Internet of Things. This type of collaboration is crucial for success in a digitalized business!

The Siemens Mobility team is doing a great job running a business that has been highly successful in recent years. They are operating in a growth market whose prospects we believe are very optimistic. At this year’s InnoTrans, they impressively demonstrated that Siemens Mobility has the right technologies to optimally serve this market and its customers.