The questions plant directors, body and coating engineers and quality leads ask in the first meeting, answered as plainly as we can, including where the answer is planned rather than done.
Illustrative scenario: Car 07 of a 4-car metro consist · shell line B · bogie shop · booth 2 · marriage station, one car, one approval gate
Twelve questions. If yours is not here, ask it.
Only within an explicit tool allow-list with per-tool rate and magnitude limits, inside the approved control-plan envelope, and only at the autonomy level your plant has set. Design partners start in shadow mode, where Railira writes nothing. Heat-input and weld-sequence changes, schedule release and car release stay with a named approver.
Control returns to the robot, PLC or station's last known-good state. Railira is a supervisory layer on top of the controllers, safety systems and interlocks you already run, never a replacement for them, so an outage degrades the line to its current way of running, not to a stop.
Recommendations start from the control plan, the work instructions and the twin in the first weeks. Weld, geometry, coating and torque prediction improve as line history and labelled outcomes accumulate per car type. Onboarding is sized at 100 to 500 GPU-hours per plant and 50,000 to 250,000 synthetic images or scan variants per program, all design targets.
Only if you choose cloud training. Designs, control plans, program data, process models and quality records are isolated per tenant and never used to train another customer's models. Fully on-prem deployment at the plant edge is available for regulated plants, and cross-plant learning is planned and waits on data-rights agreements.
You are, the same as with any control strategy, which is why every write is policy-checked, bounded, logged and reversible, and why anything above your risk threshold waits for a named approver. The audit log records the request, the evidence, the envelope applied and the human decision.
A paid pilot on one process or line area, scoped to a single wedge with a success metric written into the order form: weld or coating rework reduction, geometry escapes, torque escapes, line stoppage minutes or first-time-through. It starts in shadow mode against a baseline from your own records, moves to assist mode when the engineer is satisfied, and expands only after the number moves.
The one that is costing you the most. The wedges we propose are weld and coating defect inspection in the body or coating shop, carbody alignment prediction, torque-escape assurance, and line sequencing against takt. Each has a metric a plant already measures.
Control plans and PFMEA, EN 15085 weld classes, IRIS / ISO/TS 22163 quality rules, TSI, AAR and APTA safety requirements, bogie torque specifications, wiring continuity specifications, brake-test procedures, rail coating and livery standards and your non-conformance and genealogy procedures. Retrieval is tenant-isolated and every answer cites what it used. Knowing a standard is not the same as holding a certification, and we do not claim one.
No. Dashboards report. Railira perceives, decides and acts inside limits you set, and writes the record. The review console exists so body, coating and quality engineers can approve, correct and feed back, and those corrections train the models.
Usually not to start. Most plants already have weld controllers, laser trackers or scanners, torque tools with trace export, booth instruments, wiring testers and MES. Railira fuses what is there. Camera coverage varies by station and is confirmed per site.
The Process tier is $16,000 per production process or line area per month for one autonomy or inspection module. The Plant tier is $120,000 per month for the whole plant. Enterprise is priced per agreement for multi-plant OEM and tier-1 networks, landing between $1M and $15M in annual contract value.
No. Railira is a product company building its own software. Integration with your PLM, MES, robots, metrology, torque, test and coating systems is part of deploying the product, not a services business.
Every Railira run is an ordered, inspectable sequence. This is run_9b4e27: Car 07 of a 4-car metro consist · shell line B · bogie shop · booth 2 · marriage station. Scenario completes in 10 steps with one approval gate. Shell geometry held inside tolerance after a twin-ranked weld sequence, one heat-input change approved by the shift weld engineer, two torque traces routed to rework before brake test, the livery cure window protected in the sequence, marriage interface inside tolerance, car released with full genealogy.
Plant Orchestrator · Pulled the work packages for car 07 from MES and PLM: aluminium extrusion shell, EN 15085 weld class per joint, control-plan geometry tolerances, bogie torque specifications, livery recipe and cure window, fit-out and marriage sequence. Locked the approved control-plan envelope for the shift.
Line-and-Logistics · Sequenced the shift against live readiness: booth 2 cure window, bogie B-14 readiness, brake-test slot at 13:40, AMR fleet state and kit inventory. The plan moves car 07 marriage behind car 06 to keep the cure window and the test slot.
Train Twin · Simulated 18 candidate weld sequences for the roof-to-sidewall joints on the as-built twin and ranked them on predicted distortion, door-aperture geometry and heat input. Sequence #6 keeps the aperture inside tolerance with 2% less heat input than the standing sequence.
Weld-and-Structure · Recommended sequence #6 and the matching clamping plan to the shell line. Seam vision and laser-tracker geometry confirmed the roof-to-sidewall joints inside the control-plan tolerance on the first four seams.
Plant Orchestrator · Sequence #6 lowers heat input on the roof joints 2% below the standing weld procedure. Heat-input changes stay with a named engineer, so the step was held for the shift weld engineer and approved at 06:12:44 with the twin evidence attached.
Bogie-and-Running-Gear · Press-fit curves and torque traces on bogie B-14 read at the station. Two traction-motor mounting traces fell outside the expected profile and were routed to rework before brake test; the remaining safety-critical joints verified to spec.
Coat-and-Livery · Booth 2 humidity and temperature, film thickness and flash time watched through the livery pass. One masking misalignment on the door band flagged by booth vision before the second coat; the cure window held and handed to the sequence as a hard constraint.
Marry-and-Couple · Carbody and bogie scans compared against target interface geometry before the lift. Fit-out readiness confirmed by Fitout-and-Interior for doors and glazing. Marriage guided inside tolerance; coupler and gangway checks verified and written to the twin.
Quality-and-Anomaly · Weld and coating vision, in-line metrology, torque, wiring continuity and brake-test results fused at the edge across the car. Every finding localised to station, work package and shift, with the two torque reworks and the masking flag already closed.
Conformance · Car 07 released: genealogy written (weld records per joint, geometry scans, torque traces, coating recipe and cure record, fit-out checks, marriage interface, approvals, test results) and dispositioned against the control plan and IRIS / ISO/TS 22163 criteria with cited evidence for the quality engineer's sign-off.
A rolling-stock plant does not go from manual to unattended in one step. Railira makes the level explicit, auditable and reversible at any time. The first release runs shadow mode, then assist mode, then bounded autonomy on low-risk actions. Weld parameters, schedule release and car release stay with named humans until acceptance is earned.
| Level | What the agent does | What the human does | Where it sits in a pilot |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 · Shadow | Reads weld, metrology, torque, coating, wiring, test, robot and MES signals; predicts and recommends; writes nothing | Runs the line as today; compares predictions to inspection and engineer outcomes | Shadow mode; baseline measured from the plant's own records |
| L2 · Assist | Proposes weld-sequence, geometry, coating, torque and sequencing moves with evidence, confidence, envelope and rollback path | Approves each move in the review console | Assist mode; accuracy and ROI proven against the baseline |
| L3 · Bounded | Executes pre-approved low-risk actions: inspection routing, rework priority, kit feeding, robot path variants and parameter adjustments inside approved bounds | Approves heat-input and weld-sequence changes, schedule release and car release | Graduated autonomy, after audited accuracy and ROI and safety gates |
| L4 · Scaled | Supervised weld-parameter adaptation inside pre-approved control-plan envelopes, across lines and plants | Sets the envelope; reviews the shift record and the evaluation results | Planned; after IRIS, plant and OEM acceptance is earned |
Railira writes to production systems. Every capability is scoped, every write is policy-checked against the approved control plan, and every action is written to an append-only audit log the plant owns.
| Item | Scope | Status |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 Type I and OEM cyber review | Cloud control plane | QUEUED Planned, first 6 months |
| SOC 2 Type II | Cloud control plane | QUEUED Planned, 6 to 12 months |
| SSO and RBAC | Console and approvals | QUEUED Planned, 6 to 12 months |
| IRIS and regulatory assurance packages | Disposition and genealogy evidence | QUEUED Planned, 6 to 12 months; not a certification claim |
| Standards-cited reasoning | Control plans, EN 15085, IRIS / ISO/TS 22163, TSI, AAR, APTA, torque and brake-test procedures | RUNNING In the design, every answer cites its source |
| Per-tenant and program isolation | Designs, control plans, models, memory | RUNNING In the design from day one |
| On-prem and plant-edge deployment | Regulated plants | RUNNING Design option |
Land on one workflow with a measured baseline. Expand by process, module and autonomy level. Outcome components are available on rework, line uptime, first-time-through and takt. Annual prepay carries a 15 to 20% discount.
Carbody, coating or assembly autonomy or inspection AI for one process. For plants validating ROI on the wedge.
The whole plant: weld and structure, carbody and join, geometry and framing, coat and livery, marry and couple, fit-out and interior, quality and anomaly, line and logistics, and the twin.
Multi-plant OEM and tier-1 networks standardising on Railira, with custom carbody, coating, torque and takt models and a plant-edge fleet.
Start with one carbody, bogie, coating, fit-out or sequencing process and one measurable baseline. A paid pilot on weld and geometry, torque assurance, livery defects or line sequencing shows the number before you commit further.
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