Purpose: to spark new ideas, innovations, and approaches to solving a relevant issue affecting the railroad industry.
Award Amount: $500. The competition winner will also be recognized at the conference banquet dinner on Tuesday, April 21.
Open to: All Registered Participants
Registration Form
How to Attend: Register using the link above by April 1, 2020, and submit your presentation to the JRC Organizing Committee by April 10, 2020.
Registration Deadline: April 1, 2020
Submission Deadline: April 10, 2020
Presentations: April 21, luncheon, 12:00 pm - 1:15 pm
This year the JRC will host the 4th Annual JRC Grand Challenge Competition open to all conference attendees. We invite registered participants to propose an idea to the below Grand Challenge Question and present that idea to a panel of industry experts using a 10-minute presentation.
There are multiple pillars of science and technology that run the railroads. They include, but not limit to, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Computer Science. This year, the JRC grand challenge is looking for novel ideas that cross boundaries between one or multiple areas. Examples are Mechatronics, Robotics, Automation, Drones, Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence. These innovative ideas are the cutting edge of changing the status quo in safety, business intelligence, resiliency, green energy, operations, efficiency, and ride quality.
The 2020 JRC 2020 Grand Challenge asks all researchers and attendees to submit their idea around the topic below:
This year, ASME Rail Transport Division and the Joint Rail Conference celebrate 100 years of tracking and promoting railroading progress. The last 100 years of railroading has seen industry-wide transitions to new technology, including the rise of diesel-electric locomotives, continuously welded rail, and positive train control. What do you foresee will be the next significant breakthrough in technology that will transform rail transportation over the next 100 years?
The forum is open to ideas that the presenter is working on or believes has enough relevance to the current and future state of railroads. However, attendees should be mindful of the limitations of these technologies within the railroads. As an instance, implementing a reliable and scalable AI model to provide accurate recommendations for improving safety requires a significant amount of high-quality data. Creating or obtaining data sets that are sufficiently large and comprehensive is often challenging. Therefore, one should first propose a platform for gathering the required data to train the models.
The presentations will be judged by a panel of three industry experts as well as the ranking given by the public audience. The JRC 2020 competition winner will receive the $500 award and will also be recognized by ASME at the conference banquet dinner on Tuesday, April 21.