Signal & Telecommunication (S&T) department of Southern Railway organised a webinar under the aegis of IRSTE (Institute of Railway Signal & Telecommunication Southern Railway) Chennai chapter on 20-11-2020. The webinar was webcast live on the internet for the benefit of wider audience.
Pradeep Kumar, Member S&T/Railway Board was the Chief Guest on the occasion. John Thomas, General Manager/Southern Railway & Anshul Gupta Additional Member/ Signals were the guests of honour.
Pradeep Kumar, Member Infrastructure/ Railway Board launched the IRSTE/Chennai Chapter website on the public domain. Speaking on the occasion from New Delhi over video conferencing he appreciated the efforts of Southern Railway in absorbing latest Technologies & organising seminars and webinars for the dissemination of knowledge.
Member/Infra mentioned that Railways is planning to invest 13.5 Lakh crores of rupees in modernizing the infrastructure from National Infrastructure fund in the next five years. He emphasized that to reduce the load on maintenance of assets, Artificial intelligence (AI) will play a major role by automating the maintenance processes. As a pilot project already 100 stations across Indian Railway network have been identified for predictive maintenance of S&T assets.
Ten (10) stations in Southern Railway which are on Golden Quadrilateral and Golden Diagonal (GQ & GD) routes are part of this pilot project. These stations are Basin bridge, Korukkupet, Tiruvottiyur, Ennore, Sulurpetta, Nayudupetta, Avadi, Kadambattur, Tiruttani and Puttur. Unlike the present system of carrying out maintenance in a periodical manner, a predictive maintenance system will continuously monitor the condition of the equipment and generate the required alerts so that need based maintenance can be carried out. This will result in huge savings in maintenance costs and also reduce the asset failures.
John Thomas, General Manager/S.Rly, Guest of Honour addressed the participants. He highlighted the various achievements of S&T department of Southern Railway in adopting & applying latest technologies in day today working.
Anshul Gupta, Additional Member/ Signals informed the gathering about the developments taking place in the field of AI in Indian Railways. He further conveyed that the specification for data acquisition is under deliberation by Railway Board & will be finalized shortly.
In his presidential address R.Baskaran, Principal Chief Signal & Telecommunication highlighted the efforts taken by IRSTE/Chennai Chapter in educating the members about the latest technologies.
