State-owned freight logistics group Transnet has established a new research and development (R&D) unit that will be housed at the Innovation Hub, in Pretoria, and which has entered a three-year collaborative research partnership with South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

Transnet intends to invest R150-million a year into R&D programmes over the remaining period of its seven-year market demand strategy (MDS), which runs until the end of March 2019.

Through the MDS, the utility plans to invest R300-billion into South Africa’s railways, harbours and pipeline networks between 2012 and 2019 in a bid to lay the basis for an increase in future investment and trade.

CEO Brian Molefe stresses that technology has become a key driver for logistics businesses globally and says its collaboration with the CSIR is designed to improve the way its infrastructure and equipment is designed, as well as the way it is deployed.

He is also keen for Transnet to emerge as a repository of new intellectual property that could be sold across Africa and to the rest of the world.

An initial 13 flagship projects have been identified, covering areas such as operational safety, energy efficiency and regeneration, environmental and water management, alternative fuels, tracking and automation, as well as system and enterprise engineering.

Molefe is particularly keen for the collaboration to find a solution to the ongoing scourge of level-crossing accidents, as well as to find ways to feed electricity generated from train braking systems back into the network.

CSIR CEO Dr Sibusiso Sibisi says the science council will apply a systems approach to some of Transnet’s most complex problems, owing to the fact that it is in a position to draw on multiple science and technology disciplines in tackling the challenges across the group’s five operational units.

Sibisi also indicated that the collaboration fits in with its strategy objectives of homing in on fewer research areas where it can “go big”. Besides the infrastructure milieu, the science council has aspirations to pursue large-scale flagship projects in the areas of health- care and biotechnology.

Transnet’s new R&D unit already employs more than 250 scientists and engineers and Transnet intends recruiting a further 150 university graduates in the coming few years.