An AI Startup Is Helping North American Diesel Trains Clean Up Their Act

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Transportation is responsible for one quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. While companies have touted electric vehicles and sustainable aviation fuel as ways to cut emissions from air and road travel, reducing the climate impact of rail transport has received relatively little attention.

A Canadian startup wants to lessen that impact. Montreal-based RailVision Analytics has developed artificial intelligence-enabled software to help locomotive engineers make small adjustments in train driving that could lead to big savings in diesel fuel. That could help freight and passenger trains cut into the roughly 100 million tons of planet-warming gases released into the atmosphere every year.

“It is just like Google Maps,” says Dev Jain, founder of RailVision Analytics, of his AI application that can be downloaded on a tablet and run offline. While Google Maps tells automobile drivers to turn right or left, RailVision's app guides locomotive engineers to “stay idle” in the next mile or “increase speed.”

Essentially, the idea is to enable locomotive engineers to eliminate wasteful practices and leverage invisible forces that could assist their driving. If you've driven a car, you're almost surely familiar with the law of inertia discovered by Isaac Newton in 1686, which states a moving object can continue in the same direction unless a force affects it. That means a vehicle can stay in motion — in other words, coast — without the use of manmade propulsion until friction or other forces stop it.

But “driving a train is like driving a roller coaster,” Jain says. The length of trains means that when trains are traveling on tracks where the elevation changes, often, some rail cars will begin climbing uphill while the rest are