UP - Union Pacific Corporation

01/28/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 01/28/2025 16:00

The Next Frontier in Predictive, Proactive Railroading

I grew up looking up facts in encyclopedias, figuring out directions using trifold maps and listening to my music on cassette tapes. While these tools conjure up fond memories, I much prefer the ease and speed of a smartphone to navigate my life.

Katie Sanders, Assistant Vice President of Operations Technology

I've seen similar leaps during my time at Union Pacific Railroad, where we're investing heavily in game-changing technology to become more agile and better connected. Within our Operations Technology team, this means using big data and AI to rethink how we develop and execute our transportation plan to deliver the service we sold our customers.

Transportation planning determines how we route rail cars, allocate resources and manage our field terminals. Any improvements to the plan can create huge, cascading benefits across our operations, but a plan is only great if it's dynamic - and railroad transportation planning is complicated. We have to consider over 100,000 route combinations and more than 300,000 cars moving through 23 states.

Traditionally, transportation planning has been a manual process involving many people with decades of collective years of experience. Today, by partnering our frontline operators with Tech experts and leveraging AI, we're driving smarter and more streamlined plans.

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An optimal transportation plan safely minimizes car layovers (similar to an airline layover, rail cars may stop at a terminal and move to a different train consist) while dramatically improving how fast we react to factors like routine maintenance and weather that require us to reroute trains (whether it's days or hours).

We recently took one step closer to this vision by kicking off a multi-phase project that pairs the power of AI with a new Union Pacific-built platform to create optimal and dynamic transportation plans. Even though we're just starting to unlock its potential, this model is already removing thousands of unnecessary car touches, reducing manual work events and improving network fluidity.

We're also creating a real-time, two-way data feedback loop that enables our transportation management system, NetControl, to quickly update the plan based on current conditions (similar to how Google Maps suggests alternative routes during traffic jams). Finally, we're starting to develop decision-assist technologies to help our field team agilely adjust when things don't go as planned.

Technology is only as powerful as the expertise of the team driving it, which is why achieving our goals requires combining real-time data insights with the knowledge of our best operators - an ideal case of AI learning from human expertise while also enhancing it. This holistic approach is why Union Pacific remains relevant 162 years after our founding, and why we consistently set new standards for Safety, Service and Operational Excellence.