Towards AI Trustworthiness Assessment Framework for Railway Applications

While artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to significantly enhance performance of railway transportation and mobility, ensuring its trustworthiness and safety remains a serious challenge. Indeed, the deployment of AI systems in general, and particularly in railway applications, gives rise to multidisciplinary concerns spanning ethical, social, economic, and technical dimensions. This paper first presents an overview of the key concepts related to AI trustworthiness assessment and then outlines the foundational steps for establishing a framework to assess AI trustworthiness in the railway sector, in light of the EU AI Act. Specifically, it explores the parallels between railway risk assessment and AI trustworthiness assessment, while adapting the definition of risk to encompass the AI-related risks, and extending the analysis activities to consider additional trustworthiness attributes.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI systems, Railway applications, AI trustworthiness assessment, AI act.