Digital Railway as a precondition for industry, science and education interaction by knowledge management

Abstract

Abstract Digital systems in railways known as “digital railways” have dramatically changed the railway industry and the nature of railway employees’ work. The Digital Railway is in a large extend linked with the knowledge-based economy, knowledge management and knowledge management technologies which have had a significant impact on digital transformations in the industry and professional education. An ontology characterized the cause-effect and aggregative relations reflecting transformation chains in the various spheres of human activity and shedding light on the Digital Railway place in the context of digital economy is presented. The article argues that the Digital Railway role in changing mechanisms of interaction between industry and universities, which are also specialized research centres with closer ties to the industry, is best understood applying to the idea of “a smart contract” that can be reduced to artificial intelligent agents serving as intermediaries providing interaction between the non-human and human roles in a business process. With the smart contract technology, the Digital Railway might provide a precedent in development of the Hybrid Corporate Intelligence based on industry-related knowledge redistributed between artificial intelligent agents and employees. From this perspective, the process of corporate informatization is seen through a system of artificial intelligent agents implying the formalization of operational rules and regulations into a shared knowledge base in a form of ontologies. The proposed idea can be transferred to universities where smart contracts may support professional training as a business process.