Freight transport is an essential pillar of the economy: it brings items from production websites to merchants and keeps shop shelves equipped. According to projections by the Federal Ministry of Transport, it will continue to grow– by 2030, freight traffic is expected to increase by a further 38 percent over 2010 levels. Even now, nevertheless, it accounts for about one third of the transport sector’s greenhouse-gas emissions in Germany. In future, more freight ought to for that reason be moved to other modes of transportation within the EU, describes Professor Uwe Clausen, head of ITL at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Circulation and Logistics IML: “Moving products– whether to rail or inland waterways– uses numerous benefits, for the environment along with for the cost-efficiency and security of freight transport.”
In Combined Transport (CT), items are carried over long distances by train or ship to terminals that function as hubs. In CT, trucks are utilized only for the shortest possible ranges– e.g., to bring items to the terminal or to deliver them from there to the dumping website. “Yet this shift in transportation modes has stagnated within the EU,” says Clausen. “The growing number of construction websites required for infrastructure expansion likewise contributes. The difficulty, then, is to guarantee that products currently on rail remain there and do not move to road transport due to disruptions or uncertainties.” Together with his group, Teacher Uwe Clausen is therefore investigating possible services for handling interruptions in rail and combined transport in the new job “Rail Disruption Simulation – Simulation-based Analysis of the Impact of Functional Interruptions in CT (RailDisSim).”
Choices in Interruption Management
Diverse stakeholders work together in CT to procedure freight efficiently– carriers, freight forwarders, shippers, operators and terminal managers. When a disturbance happens on the rail network, quick re-planning is needed. There are generally two options, describes Marius Dellbrügge, Senior Citizen Engineer at ITL and Group Leader for Transportation Modeling and Process Planning: “Either you utilize an alternative rail path or you shift the transport to road. In practice, however, picking the very best possible alternative frequently fails due to a lack of information exchange amongst the parties included. Not infrequently, roadway transportation becomes the default in interruption cases, despite the fact that a rail diversion would be more useful economically, ecologically or socially.”
In the task’s first phase, the RailDisSim group therefore is examining how stakeholders behave during disruption management. They’re identifying which factors influence the option of diversion and the transport mode utilized. For this, the ITL researchers are partnering with catkin, a Dortmund-based IT company that develops digital options for the transportation industry.
Practice-oriented Simulations
Building on field-research information and catkin’s systems, the team will develop a simulation design for modal shifts. The simulation will think about three diversion alternatives: using a various rail line, shifting to road, or rerouting via another terminal. Franziska Rosenthal, research study assistant at ITL, discusses: “Simulation-based analysis lets us pinpoint optimization potentials in dealing with operational disturbances. Through diverse scenarios, we can derive actionable suggestions for the industry.” The goal of RailDisSim is to develop a tool that assists decision-makers choose the optimum mode of transport in CT.
. With its research study into networked, climate-friendly logistics solutions, RailDisSim successfully protected funding in the “NeueWege.IN.NRW” development competition and is now economically supported by the EU and the NRW Ministry of Economic Affairs, Market, Environment Action and Energy (MWIKE). Under the “North Rhine-Westphalia 2021– 2027” program of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF, German: EFRE) and the Just Transition Fund (JTF), the project is funded with around 733,000 euros in total, approximately 466,000 euros of which goes to TU Dortmund University.
Additional information on RailDisSim
NeueWege.IN.NRW
Contact for queries: