IoT for Railway

IoT also opens up plenty of opportunities and potential for the benefit of the passengers. Some of the key areas for development are live or real-time travel info for passengers, crowd density and movement for passengers, on-premise retailers and facility operators, and on-board train public facility status to name a few.

While there are plenty of opportunities for both the rail operators and the public, there are some key challenges that need to be addressed for successful adoption of IoT and other technologies.

One of the challenges that is common with any new or emerging technology is that while solution providers often preach about the various business values of the solution, the maturity of the business model in the value proposition is still lacking. Often, the approach is still like traditional business – just sell the solution to a customer. What would be of more interest is a partnership model where the solution provider also bears some of the business risks. If the solution provider claims to be the expert in monetizing the data using the technology, then let the railway operator focus what they do best – operating the railway – while the solution provider puts in the investment and focus on making it work in the long run and generate the expected returns. Perhaps the solution provider just needs to provide the railway operator some form of minimum guaranteed annual payment.

The other challenge is on matters concerning cyber security. With the OT network now connected to the internet, the threats or risks also increases dramatically. Keeping the OT environment secured from the various nature of cyber threats, current and future, that can affect performance or uptime is becoming increasingly critical as these systems are typically the mission-critical real-time systems that can impact the safety of human lives. The fundamental issue is that cyber security is not always ingrained or built-in through proper or comprehensive data governance and risk management processes when designing and implementing the solutions. Often, the pressure to deliver a working solution within a tight schedule results in cyber security processes getting lower priority or overlooked in critical areas. Hence, a future-proof secure solution in itself should be important part of the business value proposition.