Rail Freight Data Hub Aims to Digitize Rail Freight Transport

To strengthen the competitiveness of freight railways in the face of growing intermodal competition, a joint data platform— the Rail Freight Data Hub—is to be launched. Oliver Wolff, VDV’s chief executive officer, announced this during the 2020 VDV Digital Annual Conference:

“Rail freight transport is ideally suited for greater standardization and digitization. Currently, the industry is not fully realizing its potential, and we have a heterogeneous state of the art: Some companies have fully digitized their processes and made them machine-readable, while others still rely on manual procedures. In other sectors of the economy, shipment tracking and reliable arrival forecasts are standard. Our goal is to improve service quality, accelerate processes, and minimize the error rate.” The platform is supported by companies and is intended to be available for use across the industry. The VDV is now working with its rail freight member companies to create the conditions necessary to establish, in the next phase, a company that will drive this initiative forward.

The rail freight industry currently lacks a common data platform to make processes more efficient and, ultimately, more customer-friendly. Numerous applications and data streams are not interconnected or standardized. Wolff: “In addition to higher quality, the financial aspect is significant: So far in the project, we have optimized four of about 30 use cases. As a result, based on a conservative estimate, these four improvements alone would save us 27 million euros, meaning we would have more than recouped the costs by the second year. So it’s also worth it from an economic standpoint. We can become significantly more efficient through a holistic approach to coordinated business processes and the use of data pools— which will also be noticeable to our customers.”

Successful preliminary project enters its final phase

The project has been underway for some time within the VDV committees: “But in the end, the companies themselves will support and shape the platform. The platform is intended to be open to all companies, as we are explicitly aiming for an industry-wide solution,” said Wolff. This was preceded by a pilot project that identified the numerous interfaces in the transportation process, prioritized exemplary use cases, and ran through optimized scenarios. “The industry has a lot of catching up to do digitally, and this process has begun. There is much to do. In the coming months, we will, among other things, work out all functional requirements and processes and develop the business model with the goal of subsequently founding the company,” Wolff concluded. To this end, funding from the federal government will also be sought.