Freight transport is an essential pillar of the economy: it brings goods from production websites to retailers and keeps shop shelves stocked. According to forecasts 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, however, it accounts for about one third of the transportation sector’s greenhouse-gas emissions in Germany. In future, more freight should for that reason be moved to other modes of transport within the EU, discusses Professor Uwe Clausen, head of ITL at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML: “Moving products– whether to rail or inland waterways– provides many benefits, for the environment along with for the cost-efficiency and safety of freight transport.”
In Combined Transport (CT), items are carried over cross countries by train or ship to terminals that work as centers. In CT, trucks are utilized just for the quickest possible distances– e.g., to bring goods to the terminal or to provide them from there to the dumping site. “Yet this shift in transportation modes has stagnated within the EU,” states Clausen. “The growing number of building websites required for facilities expansion also contributes. The obstacle, then, is to guarantee that products currently on rail stay there and do not shift to road transportation due to interruptions or uncertainties.” Together with his group, Professor Uwe Clausen is therefore examining possible options for handling disturbances in rail and combined transportation in the brand-new project “Rail Disturbance Simulation – Simulation-based Analysis of the Effect of Operational Disruptions in CT (RailDisSim).”
Decisions in Disturbance Management
Diverse stakeholders collaborate in CT to procedure freight efficiently– carriers, freight forwarders, carriers, operators and terminal supervisors. When a disturbance happens on the rail network, swift re-planning is required. There are usually 2 options, describes Marius Dellbrügge, Senior Citizen Engineer at ITL and Group Leader for Transport Modeling and Process Planning: “Either you use an alternative rail route or you move the transportation to road. In practice, however, choosing the best possible option often stops working due to an absence of details exchange among the parties included. Not infrequently, road transport becomes the default in disruption cases, even though a rail diversion would be more beneficial economically, environmentally or socially.”
In the project’s first stage, the RailDisSim group therefore is investigating how stakeholders act during disturbance management. They’re determining which aspects influence the choice of diversion and the transportation mode utilized. For this, the ITL researchers are partnering with catkin, a Dortmund-based IT provider that establishes digital solutions for the transport market.
Practice-oriented Simulations
Building on field-research data and catkin’s systems, the team will develop a simulation design for modal shifts. The simulation will consider 3 diversion options: utilizing a various railway, moving to roadway, or rerouting by means of another terminal. Franziska Rosenthal, research assistant at ITL, discusses: “Simulation-based analysis lets us pinpoint optimization potentials in dealing with functional disruptions. Through varied scenarios, we can derive actionable suggestions for the industry.” The goal of RailDisSim is to produce a tool that assists decision-makers select the optimum mode of transport in CT.
. With its research study into networked, climate-friendly logistics solutions, RailDisSim successfully protected financing in the “NeueWege.IN.NRW” development competitors and is now economically supported by the EU and the NRW Ministry of Economic Affairs, Market, Climate Action and Energy (MWIKE). Under the “North Rhine-Westphalia 2021– 2027” program of the European Regional Advancement Fund (ERDF, German: EFRE) and the Just Transition Fund (JTF), the project is moneyed with around 733,000 euros in overall, approximately 466,000 euros of which goes to TU Dortmund University.
Further details on RailDisSim
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