Whether you’re a railway operator in India, an airport authority in the UK, or a freight hauler or department of transportation in the US, if you’re in the transportation sector, the mantra for your business is likely, “Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.”
Automation and data analytics are widely recognized as the answers to that call — key tools for making operations more efficient, whether that means handling more cargo or passengers, controlling costs, delivering a superior customer experience, maximizing safety, managing assets more effectively or all of the above.
Most conversations about automation and analytics tend to focus on deploying sensors and building business applications to make the data they collect usable. I like to call sensors the “area of comfort” because everybody gets the concept and has had some experience with them. And applications, today, are an “area of excitement” — they’re charged with the promise of delivering business value.
All of that is great, but there’s a gap right in the middle, and it’s a big one. Something has to connect those sensors to those applications and facilitate their interactions: the communications network.
And the fact of the matter is that traditional networks simply can’t do what’s needed to make those sensors and applications truly perform.
What your transportation communications network should be able to do
To support efficiency-enhancing automation and analytics, transportation communications networks need to provide “pervasive” security, build in intelligence, connect multiple clouds and a whole lot more.
At Nokia, we’ve developed our Future X Network architecture for Industry to deliver all those capabilities. It can connect everything, process data wherever it needs to be processed, and make it actionable — as fast as possible.
Future X applied to transportation will take many forms. For highways, it will enable “roadside clouds”, which will , allow for newer, more intelligent real-time apps that will enhance safety and speed information supporting the rollout of fully autonomous vehicles, which is going to demand an enormous amount of fast, “local” computation and data storage along the highway.
For commuter railways, we’re developing smart remote stations that use networked sensor technologies to efficiently manage temperature, lighting, waste disposal and video monitoring for security. We are working on innovative solutions to convert manual maintenance inspection routines into automated processes — speeding them up, making them more cost-effective, and improving their accuracy.
At airports, we’re helping operators like Helsinki airport deploy private LTE networks — highly advanced wireless networks that extend high-speed connectivity from the terminal to the tarmac for everything from operations to security, fire and rescue to improve aircraft turnaround time and situational awareness.
The revolution is underway
The kinds of solutions Nokia is enabling are transforming the transportation sector, not only delivering sought-after digital efficiencies but also giving organizations unprecedented control over every aspect of their operations: their infrastructure, facilities and assets. Just how far that transformation can go depends only on how much imagination we bring to it.
At Nokia, we are excited about bringing the practical benefits of this indsustrial transformation to our customers in the transportation sector today. All aboard, let’s Go Allwhere!
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