The action to be funded under this topic is expected to provide a more innovative business orientation for the exploitation of the results from the Europe’s Rail programme related to digital solutions and in particular automated functions.

Digitalisation and automation in rail are expected to provide added value to the sector in terms of increased capacity and reliability or decrease of capital and operational costs. But other new type of business services could potentially be delivered to customers (both passenger and freight) and those needs to be researched and their potential to enhance the competitiveness and attractiveness of rail transport be analysed.

The action to be funded under this topic shall therefore find innovative type of business services that could be launched within the rail ecosystem using these new automated functions. It is important that applicants would “think out of the box”, trying to anticipate how the market innovation implementation would create the opportunity in the rail sector for innovative and ground-breaking type of services, like for example the digitalisation of mass communication through internet allowed the creation of innovative services, including in the transport domain as Uber. This is valid for all market segments and shall cover both passengers and freight. Associated business case analysis for each new potential services shall also be delivered in order to have a first assessment of costs and gains repartition.

Finally, the work shall also cover a model showing how the modal share of rail transport could evolve taking into account these innovative services and based on overall trends and forecast for the next decade.

Interactions with other EU-RAIL projects:

The System Pillar will deliver a new functional system architecture for the railway system, which will have an impact on the overall system design, the automation functions that are going to be developed, including their performance and their costs). The action to be funded under this topic shall take into consideration the work to be released by the System Pillar and its evolution.