The use of data and analytics across the railway process has moved on from its infancy and become a fully-fledged facet of everyday operations. Armed with a better idea of how their systems work and the benefits of the technology, users and developers are now looking at ways they can refine, improve and further develop the processes to maximise the benefits of the data.
At Rotaia Media’s Rise of IoT and Big Data in Rail conference in Munich in May, experts from across the industry explained how they are using IoT on a daily basis. However, a strong theme running through the discussions was data management. While companies have been interested in gathering as much data as possible, they are now beginning to take a deeper look into what data they specifically need and how to cut through the ‘noise’ to extract meaningful insights that could otherwise be lost.
“I think we are not talking about data lakes anymore, we have data oceans at this moment,” explained Plasser & Theurer director of technology and innovation, Mr Florian Auer. “A human is not capable of interpreting this data and therefore we need help from computing such as deep learning and machine learning software to help us interpret the data and get useful data out of this.”