South Central Railway (SCR) General Manager Gajanan Mallya handed over the letter of acceptance to Indian School of Business (ISB) deputy dean Milind Sohani for setting up a Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics for the Indian Railways on Thursday.
Railway Board chairman and CEO Vinod Kumar Yadav, who participated in the function virtually, said it is a very important step towards transformation of Indian Railways, which has already digitised almost all of its systems like passenger reservations, freight operations, material management, stores procurement and human resource development.
“It is essential that all the data gathered is analysed for betterment of customer services and to provision of better services for both passenger and freight customers. Indian Railways is looking forward to use AI and DA in partnership with ISB for innovative solutions on this front,” he said.
Mr. Mallya said that the time is right for setting up of such an advanced technology centre as new technologies have become vital tools to make the organisations more effective by optimal utilisation of its resources to meet both customer and organisational goals.
“ISB would like to bring in new thoughts, business knowledge and expertise to partner with the Indian Railways in its transformation journey. The vast data generated by the railways will be used for strengthening the functioning,” said Mr. Sohani. The collaboration with ISB is for 12 months during which projects will be undertaken for improving operational efficiency.
Training modules will include cloud computing, data science, big data analytics, AI using reinforced learning and various other techniques to be used for forecasting and prediction.
ISB will further help in identifying the best global practices.
Demand data (seasonal/local) captured in IR system can help predict future demand pattern and also help in optimal utilisation of resources and cost control by weeding out the ineffective/inefficient resources, said an official spokesperson in a press release.
