Hitachi Rail Optimizes Trains, Signaling, and Infrastructure with ‘HMAX’ AI Solution, Accelerated by NVIDIA

Hitachi Rail launched its digital asset management suite, powered by NVIDIA AI technology, designed for transport operators to help run and maintain railways. The solution helps to optimize trains, signaling, and infrastructure.

The HMAX (Hyper Mobility Asset Expert) suite is an all-in-one digital asset management platform that provides transport operators with a number of AI-enhanced digital solutions to help better optimize trains, signaling and infrastructure management.

Hitachi’s digital tools already use digital sensors to remotely monitor the health of assets and improve their performance. The HMAX platform is designed for when live data collection is combined with AI technology to help enhance the speed, ease and depth of analysis. Using the insights offered by HMAX, helps operators to more accurately predict, optimize and transform their services.

Hitachi Rail is leveraging NVIDIA’s industrial AI platform and software tools, and Hitachi Digital’s AI Centre of Excellence and software engineering expertise, to offer operators more advanced solutions. The HMAX digital platform’s “edge to cloud” architecture helps to enable Hitachi Rail’s customers to be able to remotely access these features all through a single portal, as well as at operational centers. The solutions are part of Hitachi’s vision to bring AI into the world of Operational Technology, equipping frontline workers, engineers and operators with the features of AI.

The collaboration with NVIDIA incorporates the industrial-grade NVIDIA IGX platform with NVIDIA Holoscan sensor processing platform, allowing volumes of data to be processed at the ‘edge’ (on the trains or infrastructure) in real time, with only relevant information sent back to the operational control centers. This helps to enable an improvement in the speed that actionable insights reach transport operators, as previously it could take up to days for data to be processed in maintenance locations.