Europe’s Rail at ITF Summit 2026: Steering AI for Transport Resilience

From 6 to 8 May 2026, Europe’s Rail Joint Undertaking joined the International Transport Forum Summit 2026 in Leipzig (Germany) as a Silver Sponsor, taking an active part in the world’s largest gathering of transport ministers and the premier global transport policy event. Focused this year on the theme “Funding Resilient Transport”, the Summit explores ways to mobilise the investments and financing strategies needed to strengthen the resilience of transport systems – for better long-term connectivity, efficiency, and reliability in transport infrastructure and operations. 

Throughout the three days of the Summit, the EU-Rail stand served as a live hub for exchange, discovery, and collaboration. Visitors were invited to discover Europe’s Rail’s work and the concrete solutions it brings to the real-world European railway system and to citizens’ day-to-day lives, thanks to the recently launched Interactive Solutions Catalogue.  

Giorgio Travaini, Executive Director of Europe’s Rail, delivered a keynote speech during the high-level Ministers’ Roundtable “Steering AI for Transport Resilience: Governance and Funding Pathways“. The session brought together ministers and senior transport officials to discuss how AI is transforming transport and what it means for policy, regulation, and sector capabilities, and how transport authorities should govern and integrate AI into their internal operations and institutional frameworks. 

Travaini highlighted the Joint Undertaking’s work on AI-driven traffic management, predictive maintenance, and automated train operations, that is reshaping how network managers plan capacity and ensure resilience, while stressing the need to embed cybersecurity-by-design in an increasingly digital railway system.  

He emphasised that AI offers a real opportunity to increase network capacity and strengthen resilience by anticipating disruptions before they cascade. However, the main risk is fragmentation: if each Member State develops its own AI-driven systems for rail capacity management, traffic control, or asset monitoring in isolation, Europe will replicate the costly mistakes of past bespoke national implementations. AI governance must be coordinated at European level, with harmonised data standards and a whole-of-government approach aligning R&I, standardisation, regulation, and pre-deployment in parallel. 

“AI in transport cannot be effectively trained without deep domain knowledge and a common rail dataspace. Rail data is scattered across national stakeholders and requires harmonised models, agreement on semantics and governance — which is precisely why a structured European partnership is the right governance to ensure the secure and harmonised use of AI in Europe, building on the ERA ontology as a common language for the sector.” 

A structured public-private partnership like the Joint Undertaking, where ministries sit alongside industry, operators, and research institutions, demonstrates that shared governance works, ensuring that AI solutions respond to real public policy needs while benefiting from private sector innovation capacity and investment commitment.  

Travaini also stressed the need for cybersecurity-by-design in an increasingly digital railway system: as AI becomes embedded in safety-critical rail operations, alignment with the latest cybersecurity regulations and standards — validated through cross-border testbeds before wide-scale adoption — is essential to maintaining operational resilience. The EU-Rail Joint Undertaking is working in this direction, also focusing on pre-deployment activities as the critical instruments to validate AI-enabled solutions in real-world and cross-border conditions before committing to wide-scale deployment — de-risking investment and building trust among operators, suppliers, and public authorities. 

Following the morning roundtable, in the afternoon the ministers’ visit at the stand took place, offering an additional moment of exchange between EU-Rail and high-level transport decision-makers from different countries.  

Giorgio Travaini also participated in a video interview on the role of rail research and innovation in building transport resilience and implications for Europe’s competitiveness. He underlined that the resilience of transport is more essential than ever nowadays, with shocks that are persistent and increasingly coming all at once. Europe’s Rail is committed to ensuring rail remains always available for citizens and businesses, through innovation, collaboration, and the deployment of solutions across the European network. Harmonisation is equally key: there is no resilience without it, and reducing fragmentation remains a major focus of Europe’s Rail work. Resilience also drives competitiveness and, as the most sustainable transport mode, rail is uniquely positioned to support Europe’s climate goals. Looking ahead, pre-deployment will be a central pillar of the upcoming Joint Undertaking’s work. 

In line with the theme of the Summit, Travaini states: 

“We are pitching out to the ministers here that it is worth investing in rail today, in order to create a sustainable future for tomorrow that is resilient”. 

You can watch the full interview here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7458127306029621249