Developments and prospects of freight railway transport in Northern Germany: a Delphi survey

Abstract

Despite the fact that Germany has a well expanded traffic infrastructure, it confronts a strong growth in freight volumes and it is very likely that in the forthcoming years will not be able to reasonably cope with the increasing demand. The aim of this paper is to explore the developments of the transport sector, railways in particular, in North Germany. More specific, the paper explores whether the railway network could contribute to improved traffic development in North Germany and also whether or not the existing logistics practices are effective enough to cope with the traffic problems in the region. The research based on the Delphi technique, collected, analysed and summarized the opinions of a group of experts in the aforementioned issues. Results indicate that railways could represent the solution to the forecasted growing freight volumes in the next years. In spite of continuous efforts undertaken by the politics and the economy, the existing logistics and freight traffic concepts are not sufficient, financing is too scarce, while emerging issues like sustainability, environment protection and working conditions are taken into little consideration.

Research on optimization method of railway construction scheme based on multidimensional combination weighting and improved grey theory

“…This process ultimately leads to the optimization of the scheme. In terms of index weighting, most of the initial use of a single weighting method, common expert evaluation method, Delphi method 3 , analytic hierarchy process 4 and other subjective weighting method and entropy weight method 5 , coefficient of variation method 6 , CRITIC (Criteria Importance Tough Intercrieria Correlation) method 7 and other objective weighting method. While the expert judgment method allows for the quick and convenient utilization of expert knowledge and experience, it is susceptible to the influence of individual experts' subjective biases.…”