Founded in conjunction with several partners including Motorola, MIT, Tsinghua University and California High Speed Rail Authority, the center aims to guide the estimated $300 billion that China plans to spend building out high-speed rail lines across the country.
As planned, China should have more high-speed rail in five years than the rest of the world combined.
IBM’s Keith Dierkx says that the first issue is safety. A train traveling more than 200 miles per hour, or one carrying millions of tons, takes a long time to stop.
He said, "Imagine a mesh network on the train. You’ll have hazmat detectors, you’ll monitor for leakage, you’ll have intrusion detection and sensors that will tell you if a refrigeration unit has failed. In the future, we will be able to automatically slow or stop a train from a control center.
Derailments and delays become a thing of the past. There’ll be on-board capability to communicate where I am, how fast I’m going, the weight distribution and what products I’m carrying. Video has also become very useful. With machine vision — the ability to automatically scan and interpret images — you can monitor the condition of the track and communicate from one train to the next."
Place sensors on bridges, tunnels, underpasses and nearby roads, and it’s also possible for a passing train to pick up status reports on all infrastructure.
CNNMoney.com reports that Keith Dierkx said, "This is a once in a generation if not once in a lifetime opportunity," he says. "If we don’t do it now, it’s not going to get easier or less expensive over time — but may become more urgent."
Note this is all going to be done from computer. And, as been shown by practical experience, computers never fail. Or not that often.