On March 17th, Dr Xu Feng presented his research on "Dynamic rail schedule delay forecasting" in Parliament.
Xu Feng and Lee Pitcher MP
Dr Xu (Sean) Feng used to commute every day to Royal Holloway on one of the busiest Southwest train routes. It became so difficult that he had to move house to avoid the journey.
In fact, he was not alone. Last year, only 67% of UK trains arrived on time - the worst performance in over a decade. This was not just an inconvenience - it was 850,000 missed hospital appointments and 1.43 million students arriving late for classes.
Thus, in this research, Sean developed an AI system, trained on four years of railway records to learn the characteristics of the entire rail network. The system also provides a statistical guarantee for each delay prediction. For example, "The 17:22 Egham-Waterloo train will be 7 minutes late, with 90% confidence".
Sean was selected as a finalist in the STEM for Britain competition, which has been held annually in Parliament since 1997. The event is organised by the All Party Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, which aims to give Members of Parliament an insight into the outstanding work being undertaken in UK universities by early career researchers.
Sean is currently our Teaching Fellow, and is also our former PhD student, supervised by Dr Khuong An Nguyen & Prof Zhiyuan Luo.
