Visiting The World's Most Advanced Railroad
Last week, we had the opportunity to visit Fényeslitke, a small village on the Hungarian-Ukrainian border that is home to one of the most advanced infrastructure projects on the planet.
The East-West Gate - the world’s smartest freight terminal powered by a first-of-its-kind 5G network built in collaboration by United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), local technology operators, and global ICT Huawei via the Global Alliance on Artificial Intelligence for Industry and Manufacturing.
The East-West Gate’s role is to automate the transfer of shipping containers and goods between the high speed standard gauge rail tracks of the European network, to wider 'broad gauge' rail networks of the East, and vice versa; formerly, a huge logistical exercise requiring hundreds of engineers operating around the clock to keep the world’s supply chains running.
Four large transport cranes tower over the 3.5km site in constant motion locating, picking, and placing container units from incoming trains to outgoing, but strangely absent from the scene are people. Crane operators, ground teams, and security are all absent; instead replaced by hundreds of cameras and sensors that are in constant communication through a private 5G network to a central hub. Inside, teams of remote operators sit in front of banks of monitors armed with dual joysticks controlling the world’s most expensive RC toys.
In order to control hundreds of tons of heavy equipment and cargo often kilometers away from the operator as it is maneuvered above millions of euros of rail infrastructure with millimeter precision demands communication speeds and reliability well in advance of human reaction times; a feat previously impossible with last generation (4G) systems.
Human reaction time, the delay between stimulus and reaction, is optimistically 100ms; however, the round trip latency of 4G systems was as much as 200ms, essentially tripling the response time of an operator and so mandating operators to be physically located directly on the cranes.
The step change that EWG has achieved on its first of a kind 5G system delivers an 8ms round trip between crane to operator and back to crane. Assisted by 26 4k video streams per crane, operators report that for the first time genuine 'real time' control and communication across the site is possible.
Beyond the mechanical control the system affords, optical gates at the entrance and exit to the site records the incoming containers and contents against a digital replica of every train, container, and transport truck on site before an AI system optimises the order for collection, and dissemination of each container to maximise efficiency of transfer. To put some numbers to the level of improvement the system delivers; on average a container is picked and placed 8 times during its stay at an normal unloading and reloading facility. At EWG it is picked and placed just once, only when the next train or trailer is in position.
This efficiency improvement has increased the throughput of containers by 20% to an estimated 1,000,000 containers per year, 3 times the average site at the same time driving the operational cost of the site down by 40%. All while crane operators move out of hot crane cabs and into air-conditioned central control points. The success of EWG will inevitably drive many industries to adopt similar approaches.
The fact that these difficult mechanical tasks that typically have required the experienced hands, eyes, and brains of people are increasingly becoming the realm of complex AI - human systems, will start to redefine how we interact with the world. In the last year alone the number of private 5G projects like EWG double from 67 to 155. The EWG depot is just the beginning. Similar systems could control traffic in cities. Automate the planting, growth, and harvesting of crops. Or even allow surgeons to operate robotically on patients half a world away. But for now, they will keep the supply chain running across the world.