Engineers from China State Railway Group are using artificial intelligence (AI) to operate and maintain the country’s 45,000 km, high-speed rail network — the largest in the world.

The AI system, which is located in Beijing, China, has an accuracy rate of roughly 89%, according to engineers.

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In addition to processing vast amount of data in real-time all across China, the AI system can alert maintenance teams of abnormal situations within just 40 minutes. This can enable on-site teams to conduct re-inspections and repairs almost immediately.

The developers suggest that the new AI system has decreased the number of minor track faults in China’s railway lines by roughly 80% within the past year. Further, these railway lines did not receive any warnings concerning speed reduction associated with major track irregularity issues.

Additionally, the engineering team noted a significant decrease in the amplitude of rail movement caused by strong winds. The team of engineers collected raw data for AI to train the system and sourced this data from records of train body movements, rail vibrations, waveform values and meteorological records.

Although previous maintenance management headquarters were only issuing warnings once a week, the engineers determined that the technology had improved the efficiency of new data analysis by roughly 85%, while machine intelligence is enabling regular reports to be issued daily.