Multikriterielle Bewertung von Strategien zur Förderung des europäischen Schienengüterverkehrs (English: Multicriteria evaluation of strategies to promote European rail freight transport)

Abstract

Provided a high degree of capacity utilisation, the transport of goods on rails represents an environmentally, economically and socially advantageous mode of transport when compared to road haulage. As its current low mode-share in Europe reveals, however, rail freight transport is a competitive alternative only in a minority of cases. Explanations for rail’s under utilisation have traditionally focused on the technical interoperability of the European railway system, but more recent research has broadened to include market organisation, political structures, and social or financial conditions that hinder rail freight transport. The present study analyses how alternative fields of action for addressing these challenges can be prioritised. The study begins by examining the approaches currently used for strategy evaluation, and investigates options for methodological enhancements. Furthermore, the study addresses the question under which circumstances approaches belonging to the class of multi-criteria-decision analyses are suitable for the specific evaluation contexts. Thereafter, a methodological framework is developed for the prioritisation of strategies that draws on the multi-criteria approach ELECTRE III, embedded with Monte-Carlosimulations as well as correlation analyses. Results of a series of guided expert interviews from the EU-project REORIENT and national macro indicators on the characteristics and effects of rail freight transport serve as input data for the assessment process. For the execution of the multi-criteria evaluation within the Monte-Carlo-simulation, the algorithm ELECTRE III was implemented as a self-contained software. The result of the evaluation reveals clearly that financial constraints, in particular, compromise the competitiveness of actors in the rail freight sector. On the basis of this result, proposals for the improvement of the situation are submitted. The main methodological conclusion is that although multi-criteria approaches can effectively support strategy evaluation in the field of rail freight transport, their complexity seriously undermines a broad application. In order to make the numerous procedural-steps of multi-criteria approaches more comprehensible to stakeholders, it is proposed to visualise the partial order of individual steps, for example by means of the Hasse Diagramm Technique.