Towards rail-related multimodal freight exchange platforms: Exploring regulatory topics at EU level

Abstract

The use of online road freight transport exchanges (FTEs) in the EU-28 countries is widespread today, indicating a strong level of competition. Some exchanges attempt to distinguish themselves by developing new services, for example, warehousing services for logistics industries. In contrast, rail FTEs show a very low rate of success. Given the European Union policy goal on modal shift from road to rail and inland waterways for the next decade, there is a need to explore possibilities for improvement. This article, therefore, aims at specifying regulatory-, market-, technical- and operational success factors for implementing rail-based multimodal FTEs. It does so by exploring the success factors from established road FTEs and other successful network industries (energy and passenger transport) by performing a comparative analysis on the respective online exchanges. The theory on capability maturity development is applied, which assumes that actors engaged in a transition process steadily grow in terms of their capability to deal with various issues rising from the required transition goals. Based on the theory, a literature review and interviews, an initial capability maturity model (CMM) for FTEs is developed. Finally, learnings are summarized for the proposed multimodal FTE regarding rail and the regulatory topics for freight transport to serve as input for creating a generic CMM for online exchanges in subsequent steps of this research project. Similar research on maturity assessment of practices in online exchanges related to network industries could not be found.

Towards Rail-Road Online Exchange Platforms in EU-Freight Transportation Markets: An Analysis of Matching Supply and Demand in Multimodal Services

“…e.g., in economic (e.g., cost savings, market access), social (e.g., reduction in traffic congestion, ensuring that suppliers follow fair working conditions) and environmental (e.g., reduced emissions) terms. Based on previous analyses [9], benefits can be maximized by using standardized products (e.g., commodities) to facilitate multiple interactions on the exchange, or organizing multimodality (e.g., for optimal use of transport assets).…”

“…Further, different sources on benchmarks were explored for finding these exchanges e.g., market reports, reported case studies [27][28][29] and research databases (such as Crunchbase.com) on firms were consulted to cross check the data from the literature. Together with information collected in previous interviews [9], this enabled to apply a snowballing strategy to create a representative population for answering RQ1.…”

“…Conceptualizing and implementing such an approach is a gradual and complex process following different stages of transition [8]. For understanding this process, a basic maturity framework for online exchanges was presented in [9]. The framework was based on a study of characteristics of various network industries (capacity management, transport services, infrastructural and market conditions, regulation, etc.)…”

“…The basic maturity framework in [9] was applied for comparing online exchanges for rail freight transport services, with online exchanges of network industries with similar characteristics, notably electricity, gas, long distance passenger rail transport and urban public transport. Both road and rail FTEs in the EU turned out to be less mature than online exchanges in other industries, as their current practices are limited to only connecting the two sides of the FTEs (e.g., shippers to carriers) for their respective modes.…”