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Indicator Monitoring for a new railway PAradigm in seamlessly integrated Cross modal Transport chains – Phase 1

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - IMPACT-1 (Indicator Monitoring for a new railway PAradigm in seamlessly integrated Cross modal Transport chains – Phase 1)

Reporting period: 2017-01-01 to 2018-04-30

The context for IMPACT-1 was to evaluate socio-economic impacts of innovations in the railway system. For those technological innovations it is usually possible to estimate the functional and economic improvement within a specific technology. But it is also important to answer the question how these innovations are improving the entire railway system. Operational and economic improvement should be considered here as well as the fulfillment of customer needs and the resulting increased demand for rail travel. All those relations have been analyzed and described separately already using complex and sophisticated models before. The project IMPACT-1 aims to pave the way for an integrated view on all those aspects: using individual improvements delivered by technological Shift2Rail (S2R) projects to estimate firstly the impact on the overall railway system by using KPIs and transferring them into predictions on the change in mode choice. Additionally, customer needs on their travel path are being identified. Hence the bridge is built from innovations to the resulting “Shift-to-Rail”.

IMPACT-1 is a cross-cutting project in Shift2Rail that aimed to assess and evaluate market and societal effects of technologies developed in the Innovation Programs and the fulfilment of the programs’ operational targets (lower costs, higher capacity and better reliability). The main objective was to gain a better understanding of the impact that the Shift2Rail program will have on the future European railway system and services by analyzing the socioeconomic impact of the S2R developments, identifying future application use cases by System Platform Demonstrators (SPDs) and assessing the impact of the development by using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
The work performed in the project is divided into three work streams which are first the definition of the basis for the socio-economic impact analysis in WP2. This again is done on the basis of four use cases named “System Platform Demonstrators (SPDs)” which are defined and detailed in WP3. The same SPDs are used for the integrated assessment of the Shift2Rail innovations on the railway system in WP4.

The “Socio-economic Impact Analysis (SEIA)” (WP2) addresses the interaction between technological developments and the development of the surrounding ecosystem in which they are implemented, such as development of societal values or trends in behaviour, trade patterns or global supply chains. First, research has been carried out on socio-economic values and needs of the passengers in the context of the railway system as well as analyses important trends and potential disruptions that might impact the railway system within the upcoming years. Differentiation is made between short-term scenarios and long-term developments up to the year 2050.

The required four use cases needed for the socio-economic impact analysis as well as the integrated assessment of the KPIs were defined in WP3. For each of the market segments High Speed passenger rail, Regional passenger rail, Metro and Rail Freight, a generic platform was defined where the technical developments and innovations of Shift2Rail demonstrate their application and impact. The aim of the SPDs is to provide a better understanding of the effects of Shift2Rail on the entire railway system as well as its socio-economic environment. The first step was to collect the requirements of the SPDs, considering the characteristics of the Shift2Rail innovations. The SPDs are specified for each of the four market segments mentioned above. Closely to the definition of the SPDs, use cases needed to be defined in order to apply the Shift2Rail TDs and describe the context of the future usage. The last Task of WP3 was to define a road map for the application of the SPD concept in subsequent projects.

The integrated assessment of the SPDs (SPDIA) uses estimated improvements delivered by the other Shift2Rail projects and evaluates how the operational Shift2Rail targets for the KPIs LCC, Capacity and Reliability & Punctuality are achieved through the carrying out the multi-annual action plan (MAAP) and the resulting projects. The basic concept and structure of the KPI model was developed and documented. The reference scenarios of the KPI model were detailed with technical and operational data based on the SPD definition and the requirements coming from the Shift2Rail innovations.

IMPACT-1 has proven to be a highly integrated project within Shift2Rail as shown in the figure below: It shows the overall cooperation inside IMPACT-1 and to other Shift2Rail activities. Internally the SPDs are provided by WP3 and used in WP2 to prepare the Socio-economic impact assessment (SEIA) and in WP4 for the Integrated KPI Assessment (SPDIA). The outline of this activity is given in the S2R Master Plan and refined in the Multi-Annual Action Plan. The input for the improvements is coming from the member projects in all the IPs and especially with respect to energy consumption from FINE1 and the open call project OPEUS which is performing the energy simulations for the SPDs. In a tender, a consortium led by the company Panteia was providing a visualization of the simulation. Finally, a fruitful cooperation was done with the open call project NEAR2050 which was used for the analysis of socio-economic conditions for the SEIA.

The following activities for exploitation and dissemination were carried out with respect to the results of IMPACT-1: All IP steering committees have been regularly informed about the progress and the current results as well as asked for comments. The work done in IMPACT-1 is continued in the subsequent project IMPACT-2 where the models are refined, updated with more parameters, and integrated. Two publications were made during the execution of IMPACT-1 to inform the wider scientific public about the approach and progress: A poster was published and presented at the Transport Research Arena (TRA) 2018 in Vienna, Austria and a bilingual English and German article has been published in the German Journal Signal+Draht in the issue 1+2 in 2018.
Modelling railway systems is a well-established science. Nevertheless, the individual technical, operational, economic, and social models have well-defined focuses which are normally not integrated with each other. Socio-economic approaches typically use abstracted descriptions of technologies to derive the demand and resulting mode choice. The progress beyond the state of the art within the IMPACT-1 project is the use of defined common SPDs across the modelling and thus the adjusted approach by using the SPD integrated assessment (SPDIA). Hence the evaluation of the socio-economic impact as well as the wider societal implication of the entire Shift2Rail program are the main objective of IMPACT-1 as well as the subsequent project which aims to integrate the approaches as well as the quantification. The work of the IMPACT-1 project has paved the way to an evaluation of the innovations developed within Shift2Rail in terms of their impact on Life-Cycle-Cost, Capacity, Reliability & Punctuality, and customer experience to finally come to profound forecast of the change of mode choice. So, the sub-sequent project IMPACT-2 can further assess the impacts on KPIs, customer experience and shift to rail.
This figure shows the relation of IMPACT-1 with other CCA and IP projects