Wabtec Corporation to continue expanding R&D capabilities in India 

Rail transport company, Wabtec Corporation, says India will be one of the global centres to test its products for both freight and transit business.

The company has been investing heavily in expanding its R&D capabilities in the country over the past few years and will continue to do so by investing an additional $6 million in the next couple of years, Eric Gebhardt, Chief Technology Officer, told businessline.

“Our transit business, which is a big one out of India, will start more testing compared to the freight businesses,” he added. The transit business generated ₹1,650 crore revenue from its operations in India in CY2022. Moreover, the plan is to take a lot of the smaller testing labs from across the globe and consolidate them in India. “We are constantly figuring things out; we are rationally testing our capabilities,” said Gebhardt.

‘Phenomenal talent’

The company has two centres in Bengaluru — one a centre of excellence, and the other, a technology and engineering centre — where it is working on products such as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test platforms for FLX (battery-electric) locomotives and wayside battery charging. “The purpose of both these test platforms is to enable real-time testing of system software systems prior to deploying the end product,” he said.

Speaking about the focus of expansion in India, Gebhardt said, “We have an engineering facility located locally, and a critical mass of engineers here, plus the talent in Bengaluru is phenomenal.”

In the last few years, the company has invested about $30 million (₹250 crore) in establishing the right infrastructure for testing. Currently, it has a team of 1,300 people in the two facilities and has around 100 more job openings.

Wabtec has also launched a Vortex AI Lab, which is designed as an incubator to bring its engineers together to learn about the technology, foster innovation and collaborate on the company’s next AI product and service. “The lab will be instrumental in developing AI-related solutions for emerging technologies such as machine vision, edge computing, predictive maintenance and natural language processing. It will also enable the rapid prototyping of proofs-of-concept.

Forefront of transition

According to the business, it is also at the forefront of the transition to Industry 4.0, digitisation of the manufacturing industry, which is being fueled by disruptive developments such as the growth of data and connectivity, analytics, human-machine interaction and more.

“In fact, we are already practicing what we preach when it comes to Industry 4.0. Everything that we are creating in our factories is digital, including sensor-based technologies,” noted Gebhardt.

Wabtec Corporation is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange with an annual turnover of $8 billion in CY2022 and a global headcount of 27,000 people.

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