Duke University’s Christensen Family Center for Innovation announced it was collaborating with Railinc to explore innovations to advance freight rail safety and efficiency.
The collaborative effort will harness Duke’s Product Lab, with industry partners to deliver prototypes that have immediate impact and long-term potential. The product lab is a student-led program where team co-create solutions. The partnership, officials said, hopes to solve the common challenge of billing for railcar repairs.
Railcar repairs are controlled by conditional rules designed to ensure safe operations, but the complexity of the rules often results in mechanical teams spending time on paperwork and researching manuals. To address this, Railinc developed CarLogix, an intelligent railcar repair application to guide mechanics through the repair recording process, checking repair records against industry rules in real-time to ensure accuracy and eliminate doing the repairs over again to satisfy regulations.
“This collaboration with Duke University is about bringing together innovation, academia, and industry to strengthen the rail network. We are excited to partner with students at Duke on this project and look forward to developing solutions that will improve railcar recording and accuracy – a critical need for the freight rail industry,” Allen West, President and CEO of Railinc, said.
Duke’s students will look at how AI, mobile devices and social media-style technologies could improve efficiency and knowledge sharing. Officials said that kind of innovation is critical for teams performing minor repairs outside of traditional repair shops, where access to computers is limited.
“At Duke, we believe innovation happens when students, faculty, and industry come together to tackle meaningful, real-world challenges. Collaborating with Railinc brings our mission to life, giving our students the chance to apply their creativity to one of the nation’s most vital industries while also creating solutions that strengthen the communities and workers it touches,” Adria Dunbar, Managing Director of the Christensen Family Center for Innovation at Duke University, said.