A methodology to assess the impact of end-user centric innovations on railway transportation attractiveness

Abstract

The European Shift2Rail initiative has the target to improve the European railway system and to increase the use of it by passengers. The impact of the technical improvement developed by Shift2Rail is evaluated by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The relevant technical key targets are improved capacity, reliability and life-cycle-cost (LCC). But to increase the use of the railways there are also activities within Shift2Rail, which target to improve directly the attractiveness of the railways and focus on customer demand. Especially the innovation program 4 (IP4) “IT Solutions for Attractive Railway Services” aims to support customer satisfaction by IT solutions. During development of the approach for the evaluation of the three technological KPIs capacity, reliability and LCC it was identified that they are not suitable to evaluate innovations directly focussing on the demand of the railway system. A further approach was implemented to evaluate the impact of the technological developments in the other IPs as well as the direct impact of the IT solutions developed in IP4 on the attractiveness of the rail system. The basic concept of this approach is to identify major issues which are the subject of “Areas of Major Possible Improvement (AMPI)”, which means that issues are identified and categorised, which are reported by users as negative issues in the today’s system. Those can be solved by technical solutions on the trains, signalling or infrastructure or by IT-Solutions addressing directly the passenger. The main improvement of the approach presented here, is to combine the impact of both in one integrated model.