Safer Railways Through Better Data Analytics

Siemens is the largest industrial manufacturer in Europe, producing technology and software for the transport, medical, and energy sectors, among many others. The business has an annual revenue of €87 billion and employs around 385,000 people worldwide. In this video, Yvonne Quacken, head of digital services research and development at Siemens, explains why the company uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver its Railigent application to rail operators. The application collects data from live trains and helps operators make data-driven decisions to ensure the safety and efficiency of their rail networks. To enable this, Siemens developers needed to access and manage data efficiently across multiple business silos. Because data was not stored consistently across the organization, preparing datasets could take months, and costs were unacceptably high. Siemens built an environment for Railigent using AWS services such as Amazon Athena, AWS IoT, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This gives data scientists a self-service platform to manage data ingestion, integration, and preparation. The result is shorter development times and lower complexity, which means faster and more efficient business insights for Siemens.