Huawei Unveils Innovative Urban Rail Cloud, Railway IoT Solutions at InnoTrans 2018

At InnoTrans 2018 in Berlin, Germany, Huawei launched a pair of innovative solutions — Urban Rail Cloud and Railway Internet of Things (IoT).

Huawei leads the transformation of railway informatization and intelligent construction. The launch of two Huawei solutions will help rail industry customers transform their existing single-line operations, and enter a new era of cloud-based multi-line operations.

In addition, Huawei leverages the IoT and Big Data platforms to build more-secure, efficient, and intelligent railway disaster prevention and safety monitoring systems, helping customers build intelligent railways with comprehensive sensing capabilities.

Transforming from Single-Line to Multi-Line Operations in the Cloud Era

With a growing number of urban rail lines and increasing passenger traffic, urban rail lines in medium- and large cities have gradually formed a network, or they are developing into a network. The traditional siloed system construction will become a stumbling block, because data cannot be shared, and IT resource utilization is low.

Based on cloud computing, the Huawei Urban Rail Cloud Solution builds an IT-based infrastructure platform for multiple networked rail lines. Various services — such as Integrated Supervisory Control System (ISCS), Automatic Fare Collection (AFC), and Passenger Information System (PIS) — are deployed and carried on the cloud platform in a unified manner. This avoids the traditional method of separately implementing each service system.

Huawei Urban Rail Cloud Solution offers several advantages:
•Pooling enables resource sharing, on-demand allocation, and flexible expansion.
•A hybrid cloud architecture enables innovative passenger services and business development on the public cloud.
•The IT resource utilization rate increases from 10 percent to 50 percent, and IT equipment-procurement costs are reduced by 16 percent.
•The equipment room area is reduced by more than 100 square meters in a single station, after station-level services are moved to the cloud and O&M is centralized.

“China’s urban rail industry has a great momentum today,” said Vice Director Li Zhonghao of Academic Committee, CAMET. “It is an inevitable trend that urban rail transit will become automated, information-based, and intelligent. Networked urban rail lines will be operated in a centralized manner. The future competitiveness of the rail transportation industry depends on IT-based innovation capabilities. The key to sustainable development of urban rail transit is to break system barriers and build a new ICT platform with cloud architecture as the core.”

“Smart urban rail development calls for the urban rail cloud platform,” said Wang Guoyu, General Manager of the Transportation Solution Dept of Huawei Enterprise Business Group. “Based on the urban rail cloud, data standardization, centralization, and collaboration are implemented to fully unleash the value of Big Data and build smart urban rail. Huawei launched the Urban Rail Cloud Solution to streamline three key steps. They are: reshape the network, reconstruct the platform, and boost intelligence. The solution helps build an elastic and smooth network, and disrupt the siloed development mode, while simultaneously applying Big Data and AI technologies. It also promotes the transformation of urban rail from single-line operations to networked operations.”

An Industry First: NB-IoT Private Network Solution for All-Round Sensing Capabilities of Intelligent Railways

Huawei has deep insight into the pain points of the railway industry. As railway operation speed and efficiency are greatly improved, the railway industry is not satisfied with traditional manual inspection modes. It needs comprehensively digital, and even intelligent, tracks, trains, freight, and people.

At InnoTrans 2018, Huawei launched the industry’s first Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) solution for trackside scenarios. This makes it possible to build an intelligent railway with comprehensive sensing capabilities.

One NB-IoT-based network provides reliable access to IoT devices for track maintenance, power supply, and communications and signaling. Sensors are readily accessed and services are quickly rolled out. A unified Big Data processing platform is used to implement data convergence.

The Geographic Information System (GIS) and data visualization technology display comprehensive, accurate, and intuitive trackside infrastructure status. Based on the positioning information, personnel, assets, and tools can be located and tracked. The maintenance process can be managed and controlled to improve capabilities for safe operations. Device management is transformed from periodic manual checks to automatic inspection and status reporting in real time.

Based on an awareness of infrastructure status, traditional scheduled maintenance is changed to preventive maintenance. The full-scenario situational awareness and intelligent prediction processes are implemented to improve proactive prevention and capabilities for comprehensive collaboration.

“IT application is the symbol of railway modernization,” said Fu Weiguo of Beijing Top Xingda. “Building a smart railway requires more thorough sensing and measurement, more comprehensive interconnections, and more in-depth intelligent informatization. The Smart Railway IoT Platform we developed with Huawei adopts advanced technologies, such as intelligent sensing, the IoT, cloud computing, Big Data, GIS, and data visualization. It is fundamental to improving the comprehensive sensing and intelligent operations capabilities of railways.”

One of the world’s biggest trade fairs for showcasing transport technology, InnoTrans 2018 conference attendees include the China Association of Metros (CAMET), and Beijing Top Xingda Information Technology Co., Ltd., along with other notable industry associations and partners.