IMPACT-2 spanned many areas: market analyses, social economy, key performance indicators, standardization, smart maintenance, intelligence to freight and human capital.
The key results are:
Markets, trends and scenarios
Based on results of a customer survey, five key success factors were deduced that would improve the competitiveness of rail transport:
-Excellent quality freight transport
-Improving simplicity & service
-Digitalisation & automation
-Improving infrastructure
-Improving political boundary conditions
Mega trends of the transport market and business were identified for rail and competing modes of transport. Important trends are the market shift from traditional goods like coal, oil, steel to high value low density goods like industrial products, food, and parcels. These goods require fast, reliable, and flexible transport from door-to-door. Other important future trends are platooning and autonomous trucks that decrease the cost of road transport. Many S2R innovations support the above listed key success factors: Digital automatic coupling, Condition based maintenance, driver assistant systems, ATO, smart video gate and real time network management.
Societal benefits, high speed, regional, metro and freight use cases and modal split:
Modelling showed that the organisation of the market is important for fares, frequencies, and rail travel volume and thus to what extent the societal objectives are reached. Three trends were identified that could have large impacts on the competitiveness rail industry: deregulation as outlined in the EU’s 4 railway package, electrification & automation of road transport, reduced competitiveness of the aviation for distances below 500 km.
Policy recommendations from the modelling are: to focus on increasing the efficiency in the use of existing rail networks rather than new lines. This can be by infrastructure capacity increases, by running longer trains or by increasing occupancy rates for instance through smart booking systems and ticket pricing; focus on reducing cost in operations and infrastructure provision; make sure that appropriate track charges are set when rail is deregulated, so that operators have incentives to increase social welfare.
The question of how society’s investments in transport infrastructure and subsidies for transport can be justified was also studied. There are large benefits (consumer plus producer surpluses plus externality changes) from the S2R innovations for the high-speed, regional and the freight use cases. Modal split calculations for system: Main drivers for the modal shifts are for the high-speed case S2R innovations allowing the maximum usable track capacity to increase (allowing the train frequency to increase) and for the regional case innovations that reduce average delay minutes. For both high-speed and regional cases, customer experience innovations were modeled e.g. improved information, booking&Ticketing, and Comfort&Services). Regarding rail freight, the main driver for modal shift is increases in maximum load capacity. Reduction of operational costs, Reduction in driving time (increased speed of the trains) and Reduction in loading time also have substantial impacts.
KPI model
To estimate the overall impact of all technological developments in S2R, an integrated methodology calculating the S2R KPI as defined by the regulation was developed and validated. The model assessed the degree of target achievement in the S2R technology demonstrators and monitored their progress throughout the last years. Final results of the overall S2R programme obtained from the KPI showed significant LCC reductions for the four use cases as well as substantial increases in capacity and reliability although the target levels were in most instances not fully met.
Standardisation
IMPACT-2 investigated the standardisation ability of the S2R projects outputs and working on connecting the S2R research taskforces with the appropriate standardisation bodies and committees. It serves as an input to the standardisation part of the Standardisation and TSI input plan of the Europe’s Rail system pillar.
Smart maintenance, intelligent freight and human capital
Today maintenance is scheduled. Major advantage is the high degree of predictability of the work to be carried out from: vehicle delivery, performance of maintenance work, employee scheduling and materials management to vehicle recommissioning. Major disadvantage is that the actual condition of individual vehicles or infrastructure and components is not known. This makes it impossible to determine which specific maintenance is actually needed for each vehicle or infrastructure component and the time at which it is actually needed. A concept for a data driven CBM was developed within this work stream. Double deckers, regional and high speed EMUs were selected for the use cases.
Making freight operations more intelligent is an important step in improving its competitiveness. 21 concept (low TRL) use cases covering capacity management, fleet, staff and information management were developed and assessed.
Importance of competence in the railway industry to be able to accommodate new technologies was analysed. Retraining and upskilling will be necessary when new technologies replace existing ones. Digitalisation and AI will affect the work place and require new skill sets. A key finding is that in many places the old must co-exist with the new which means that initially more staff may be needed.
IMPACT-2 also benefitted from collaboration with the open call projects SMARTe and NEAR2050.
