The UK's Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has presented an action plan for the safe introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) in the railway sector. With the Safe AI Innovation Action Plan 2026, the authority has responded to a mandate from UK government departments and set out six key areas of focus to be addressed by 2027. These include a digital safety strategy and supplementary guidelines on digital risks in the second quarter of the 2026/2027 financial year, the updating of guidelines on the railway safety regulatory framework ROGS and the Common Safety Method for risk assessment, as well as an examination of how AI can be used in authorisation procedures for new, modernised or converted vehicles and infrastructure. ORR is also investigating the use of AI for the evaluation of complaints, passenger assistance and survey data. To this end, the authority also intends to examine anonymised or synthetic datasets, as well as data provision via the Rail Data Marketplace or its own data portal. For use cases such as infrastructure management, automated timetable generation and network operations, ORR is analysing controlled test environments such as regulatory sandboxes. Internally, ORR has already been using the WAISI analysis tool for large datasets in asset management.
