Share Free Capacity

Description

Tags: Share free train, loco, driver and wagon capacity between RUs

Todays Situation

Today each RU handles short term freed and needed resources internally. The replanning takes an important amount of time and shows a suboptimal result based on limited resources. The Rail Freight Broker (RFB) offers a new service to the freight RUs. A RU can offer his unneeded capacity on trains, tractions, personnel and wagons in the RFB. Other RUs can search for lacking capacity. If the offered capacity fulfills the needs of the RU he can book this capacity for his services. The RFB offers an advanced service that is fully integrated from searching over booking to reconciliation. From the RFB services the RUs can take several advantages. An (large) RU can optimize his resource pool and handle peak demands more efficiently. He can both reduce its replanning efforts and increase the external resource pool remarkably. A (small) RU can focus on their specific services and gain more “audience”. They enlarge their customer pool significantly and simplify the handling of each contract.

Opportunity

The RFB offers to the sector the possibility to leverage the exchange of unused resources. It will increase the usage and revenue of the own resources and lower the efforts for bilateral contracting and own replanning. To be able to offer this service to the RUs the RFB needs several important measures to be taken. As the business model is delicate for the RUs the legal and commercial framework must be thoroughgoing. The RFB service needs an alignment of the planning processes of the RUs to gain the critical mass of market coverage to provide an interesting offer to each participating RU. The central IT system that provides the trading functionality must ensure both the private character of the offer and the correctness of the capacity. To connect the necessary RU systems to the central trading platform a large integration project must be foreseen.

Use Case

Offer Free Capacity

• User story: Offering for a short term free capacity on a train, a wagon, a traction or locomotive
• Trigger: The RU receives a short term cancellation for a transport from its customer
• Description: The RU cannot use the freed capacity of its resources (traction, personal, path). The RU decides to offer the capacity on his planned resource in the RFB. He enters the characteristics of the capacity and publishes it on the RFB.

Book Free Capacity

• User story: booking of a free capacity
• Trigger: The RU wants to book a found service to complete his planning.
• Description: During his planning the RU books a found free capacity in the RFB for his service type.

Preconditions

Basic Services

• Planning

In short term planning the harmonization of the processes and timelines must be first analyzed and then aligned to ease up the cross-company usage of capacity. If the company specific processes remain as today the coverage of the Broker will be low.

• Operation

In operation the immediate and open offering of capacity is crucial for a working trading platform. Hoarding and hiding of capacity must have commercial disadvantages for the company.

• Automation

In the next years the planning of resources will be automatized. The automatic planning facilities on the members’ side (in the IT called solvers) need to take the Broker search results into account and book the necessary capacity directly. According to the current trends in the application development of the railway companies that are investing in their IT, the artificial intelligence and usage of modern technologies for automatic solvers is on the way to become the context of the next railway planning.

• Commercial processes (also to be reflected in the commercial conditions part and taken into account by the legal framework)

Tariff definition Tariff definition and update processes must be commonly defined to ensure a fair and attractive commercial model. Discount definition The commercial model must define the way discounts can be granted to preferred partners. Visibility The Broker handles much commercial relevant data. It must therefore follow a clear visibility directive in setting services up, in offering services, in searching services and charging services. It must be checked carefully which role has access to what data. Some information needs to be anonymized to protect the source. Bilateral agreements Starting from todays situation where only bilateral agreements and “holding” internal rules are available the Broker service needs to address

• • That bilateral agreements remains allowed
  • That “holding” internal open exchange remains allowed (e.g. discounts)
  • Are there bilaterally agreed tariffs (or “for free”)?
  • all bilateral agreements must be highly protected and secured so that the other partners or competitors do not see the details of the agreement
  • The bilateral agreements can serve as a (commercial) starting point for the Broker to gain market coverage and profit from already settled agreements.

The SM07 Capacity Optimization of each participating RU and the RU partners (like IM, shunting yard operators, ...) lays the basis for providing or requesting free capacity in the ecosystem.

Dependencies

• Master data source must be standardized (Capa 1 a.o.)
• RU internal ressource planning is automated to a large extent
• is related to SM07 Capacity Optimization

Planned Steps

This smart service is described in a concept from ForumTrainEurope (FTE) from April 2020.

Evaluation

• Frank Kschonsak on 25 June

This was another VDV-business case. Because of the monetary essence to this use case, it is important to focus on it. “free” in the sense of free capacity but not “free of charge”. Focus should be “free capacity” (loading-capacities [wagon, container]) as well as available loco-drivers and locos. Not only “short term” capacities but also free capacities on regular services.