The Fourth Industrial Revolution and its Impact on Railways

Abstract

The analysis of the stages of development of industrial production by human society based on the well-known concept of four industrial revolutions has resulted in retrospection of technical and technological development of railways during the periods between the industrial revolutions in terms of core rail engineering systems (infrastructure, rolling stock, control and management system), as well as contributed to outline prospects for foreseeable period. It has allowed to identify main directions of technical and technological development of productive forces characteristic of the fourth industrial revolution.The objective of the research was to identify those directions that are appropriate to be applied in relation to rail transport as well as to choose a few specific technical and technological solutions.In the field of digitalisation, it is proposed to focus on development and implementation of intelligent management systems for each workplace or of intelligent workplaces (IWP), which ensure development of optimal solutions for numerous operational tasks fulfilled by the dispatchers on duty at railway facilities. It has been determined that for a case of a large rail company like JSC Russian Railways creation of managers’ IWPs should be based on the scale and generality of the tasks solved at numerous similar managed objects since, for example, the number of dispatching sections reaches more than 400, the number of stations and simultaneously moving trains is of several thousand, and of train sheds and infrastructure sections is of several hundred, etc. This allows creating standard systems that are further replicated for specific workplaces while considering local specifics.Intelligent systems integrate as important elements fast-growing production of increasingly miniaturised, and to be underlined, constantly cheaper sensors, capable today of being built into almost any objects that in terms of railways comprise, for example, a wheel of a wagons or of a locomotive, engines, rails, any wagons or containers. This allows continuously monitoring the current state of any objects, as well as their nodes resulting in fundamentally new opportunities for reducing the cost of maintenance of rolling stock and infrastructure, as well as ensuring transport safety. Thus, for the first time ever, the task of achieving «absolute» rail traffic safety can be set.The article includes a forecast of the approximate time of the advent of the fifth industrial revolution and the trajectories of development of technical systems of railways for the period before its start. The use of the results of the study is supposed to facilitate to concretise directions of the promising technical and technological development of rail transport.