This paper provides an overview of the main results achieved within the Horizon 2020 Shift2Rail project named RAILS (Roadmaps for Artificial Intelligence Integration in the Rail Sector). The RAILS roadmapping process provided state-of-the-art, taxonomy, future research directions, and recommendations in three macro areas: Railway Safety and Automation, Predictive Maintenance and Defect Detection, and Traffic Planning and Management. RAILS findings shed light on the potential of intelligent technologies and provided essential guidelines for integrating machine learning into next-generation smart railways.

In this chapter, applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in railway traffic planning and management (RTPM) are discussed. To begin, a definition of AI is offered with a particular emphasis on its relationship with RTPM. This is followed by a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art of AI in RTPM covering strategic, tactical, and operational challenges. Next, a transferability analysis is conducted of AI approaches for traffic planning and management from related sectors to railways, specifically from aviation and road transport. The results show that the majority of AI research in RTPM is still in its infancy. Several future research areas that are important to academic and professional communities in AI and RTPM are identified based on reviews and analysis of transferability.

This chapter presents applications, challenges, and opportunities for the integration of artificial intelligence in rail transport, based on the current results of the European project Roadmaps for AI integration in the rail sector (RAILS). Past and ongoing research directions are briefly outlined, and then the regulatory landscape is presented as well as the main barriers to overcome. Some technical aspects are addressed to provide some valuable references, and a high-level description of ongoing research work is given, spanning from innovative studies on smart maintenance, collision avoidance, delay prediction, and incident attribution analysis to visionary scenarios such as intelligent control and virtual coupling.

Nowadays it is widely accepted that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is significantly influencing a large number of domains, including railways. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of the current state-of-the-art of AI in railway transport. In particular, we analysed and discussed papers from a holistic railway perspective, covering sub-domains such as maintenance and inspection, planning and management, safety and security, autonomous driving and control, revenue management, transport policy, and passenger mobility. This review makes an initial step towards shaping the role of AI in future railways and provides a summary of the current focuses of AI research connected to rail transport. We reviewed about 139 scientific papers covering the period from 2010 to December 2020. We found that the major research efforts have been put in AI for rail maintenance and inspection, while very limited or no research has been found on AI for rail transport policy and revenue management. The remaining sub-domains received mild to moderate attention. AI applications are promising and tend to act as a game-changer in tackling multiple railway challenges. However, at the moment, AI research in railways is still mostly at its early stages. Future research can be expected towards developing advanced combined AI applications (e.g. with optimization), using AI in decision making, dealing with uncertainty and tackling newly rising cybersecurity challenges.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming pervasive in most engineering domains, and railway transport is no exception. However, due to the plethora of different new terms and meanings associated with them, there is a risk that railway practitioners, as several other categories, will get lost in those ambiguities and fuzzy boundaries, and hence fail to catch the real opportunities and potential of machine learning, artificial vision, and big data analytics, just to name a few of the most promising approaches connected to AI. The scope of this paper is to introduce the basic concepts and possible applications of AI to railway academics and practitioners. To that aim, this paper presents a structured taxonomy to guide researchers and practitioners to understand AI techniques, research fields, disciplines, and applications, both in general terms and in close connection with railway applications such as autonomous driving, maintenance, and traffic management. The important aspects of ethics and explainability of AI in railways are also introduced. The connection between AI concepts and railway subdomains has been supported by relevant research addressing existing and planned applications in order to provide some pointers to promising directions.