The agreement is part of the company's strategy to invest in innovation and technology in order to remain a benchmark in rail transport
Renfe and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) have signed a collaboration agreement for the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) cases that will have an impact on the improvement of customer experience and efficiency. The alliance was formalised during a meeting between the President of Renfe, Raül Blanco, and the Director of BSC, Mateo Valero.
This collaboration is part of Renfe's strategy to remain a leader in collective, sustainable and safe transport. Throughout its more than 80-year history, the company has been a national and international reference in rail transport services, relying on innovation and technology. In recent years, it has also made a clear commitment and investment in innovation and digital transformation.
Following the significant progress made in recent years in AI and its capabilities, Renfe has designed an AI adoption model with the aim of using this technology in a secure way to drive its strategic plan in four main areas: customers, operations, productivity and knowledge management.
Renfe-BSC Agreement
In this sense, the agreement between Renfe and BSC, established for three years, will allow the sharing and implementation of research, studies and analysis, as well as the supervision of Renfe's technical implementation team in AI projects.
The collaboration includes the implementation of two use cases for business development and efficiency improvement in customer service and personalisation of customer services, such as improving the efficiency of the contact centre and hyper-personalisation of the offer to its passengers.
In addition, BSC will provide Renfe with access to its supercomputing services, as well as theoretical and academic information for its technical staff.
Barcelona Supercomputing Center, epicentre of AI development
BSC is one of the leading supercomputing centres in Europe and is home to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the MareNostrum 5. Its speciality is high-performance computing, also known as HPC (High Performance Computing), and its mission is twofold: to provide supercomputing infrastructures and services to Spanish and European researchers, and to generate knowledge and technology for transfer to society.
The centre manages the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) and is a host entity of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), an initiative leading large-scale investment and provision of HPC in Europe.
At the end of last year, the European Commission announced that BSC will host the creation of one of the first seven AI Factories in the European Union. The Barcelona centre will receive nearly 200 million euros for this project, which will be fully operational by the end of this year.
It is an ambitious proposal to become one of Europe's first AI Factories, a new type of infrastructure designed by the European Commission to drive innovation and development in AI. This initiative, which is part of the European Union's recent package of measures to position Europe as a world leader in AI, will turn BSC into an AI development epicentre, enabling both the public and private sector to drive high-impact science and technology R&D projects.
The project is funded by the European Commission, through EuroHPC JU, the Government of Spain, through the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Administration and the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and the Generalitat de Catalunya, as well as contributions from Portugal and Romania.