Special Issue on Intelligent Operation and Maintenance for High-Speed Railways

With the deep integration of next-generation information technologies into high-speed railways, the paradigm of railway operation and maintenance is undergoing profound transformation. Advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, digital twins, cloud-edge-end collaboration, and multimodal intelligent sensing are reshaping core application scenarios, including infrastructure, rolling stock, communication and signaling systems, and traction power supply systems. As a result, high-speed railway operation and maintenance is rapidly evolving from a traditional mode characterized by passive response and experience-based maintenance toward an intelligent paradigm featuring data-driven operation, proactive warning, and autonomous decision-making. In the future, the establishment of a closed-loop intelligent operation and maintenance framework spanning perception, analysis, diagnosis, decision-making, and execution will become a key enabler of lifecycle management for high-speed railway systems and equipment. Such a framework is expected to further advance high-speed railways toward enhanced safety, reliability, operational efficiency, coordination, and sustainability.

The High-speed Railway journal (CN 10-1922/U2; ISSN 2949-8678) has launched a special issue with the theme of "Intelligent Operation and Maintenance for High-Speed Railways.". Scholars and students in the field are welcome to submit their academic research or review papers.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Theory and technology for intelligent operation and maintenance, inspection and risk warning of high-speed railway infrastructure
• Theory and technology for condition monitoring, health management, and intelligent operation and maintenance of key components in high-speed railways
• Theory and technology for perception, fusion, analysis, and modeling of multi-source heterogeneous data in high-speed railways
• Theory and technology for intelligent inspection robots and automated operation and maintenance equipment for high-speed railways
• Theory and technology for cyber security, privacy protection, and trustworthy systems in intelligent high-speed railway operation and maintenance
• Theory and technology for autonomous train operation, train-ground coordination, and integrated dispatching and operation-and-maintenance systems in high-speed railways
• Cloud-edge-end collaborative computing, storage, and transmission technologies for intelligent high-speed railway operation and maintenance
• Digital twin modeling, simulation, and application technologies for intelligent operation and maintenance in high-speed railways
• Intelligent operation and maintenance technologies for smart high-speed railway stations, ticketing systems, and passenger services
• Theory and technology of time series prediction for intelligent high-speed railway operation and maintenance
• Theory and application of machine learning, deep learning, and foundation models for high-speed railway operation and maintenance

Timeline:

Release Date: April 30, 2026

Submission Deadline: September 10, 2026

Publication Date: December 2026 or January 2027

Guest editor:

• Professor Yi Jin, Beijing Jiaotong University, yjin@bjtu.edu.cn
• Professor Xinhong Hei, Xi'an University of Technology, heixinhong@xaut.edu.cn
• Professor Bing Li, Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, bing.li@ia.ac.cn
• Zhiping Lin Associate Professor, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), ezplin@ntu.edu.sg
• Doctor Aili Wang, China Railway Information Technology Group Co., Ltd,  wangaili@sinorail.com
• Professor Fei Teng, Southwest Jiaotong University, fteng@swjtu.edu.cn
• Doctor Yuening Yan, University of Glasgow, Yuening.Yan@glasgow.ac.uk