BaselHack 2024 - rAIlify

At BaselHack 2024, Siemens Mobility launched the RAILIFY Challenge: a 48-hour sprint with 120 participants to build AI-driven prototypes capable of digitizing complex railway infrastructure plans. The task centered on transforming old-style vectorized PDF and TIFF schematics into a standardized digital node–edge model by automatically detecting tracks, switches, signals, annotations, and other key elements.

The real difficulty wasn’t simple image recognition—it was handling the enormous variability in how different railway plans are drawn and structured. The goal was to create a robust pipeline that extracts meaningful topology data and prepares it for next-generation railway engineering solutions, such as interlocking modernization or optimized route calculation.

Our team won the 2024 edition with a prototype that moved Siemens Mobility one step closer to a fully digital engineering lifecycle.

The code of the challenge is available on GitHub.