Publications

Gausemeier, Jürgen; Berssenbrügge, Jan; Binger, Volker: Future Potentials of Rail-Based Cargo Transportation for the Courier, Express and Parcel-Market. In: World Congress on Railway Research, 2001

Abstract

The carriage of goods undergoes an enormous change. The significant drivers for this change are first development of new technologies and second the liberalization of rail traffic within Germany. The rapid technological development opens up new perspectives for a new configuration of the railway and its system. The future success of the rail-based transportation systems is decisively depending on the usage of the emerging possibilities and on the increase of the customers’ benefits. All these developments provide important challenges for the future business in the transportation of goods.

In order to cope with these challenges a visionary view into future, an early cognition and a well timed, consequential development of future success potentials are inevitable. Thus the German Railway decided to make use of an appropriate method called »Scenario-Technique«, developed by the Heinz Nixdorf Institut of the University of Paderborn, Germany. A scenario is a generally intelligible description of a possible situation in future, based on a complex network of influence-factors. Scenarios of multiple future developments of products and markets are used to evaluate production technologies and to work out tomorrow’s successful technology-strategies in manufacturing.

The aim of this co-operation between the Research and Technology center of German Railway and the Heinz Nixdorf Institut was to develop a future concept for Deutsche BahnŽs rail-based transportation of cargo focussing on the CEP-market (courier, express, parcel). Thereby connections between future market needs (market pull) and technological possibilities (technology push) were pointed out. Possible success potentials and requirements for the future transportation of cargo in the CEP-market have been developed by using market and environment scenarios. Considered key factors are for instance internationalisation of consignment, EU-traffic-policy, transportation costs, market size of the e-commerce and the CEP-market. Furthermore alternative technological concepts of a rail-based transportation system (scenario of the transportation chain) have been worked out. Considered key-factors among other are Intermodal transport concepts, type and size of train modules.

The different developments have been evaluated by the question “How suitable do the technical concepts accomplish the market and customers’ requirements of the CEP-market-scenarios?” As a result possible strategical activities in order to realise a suitable, future transportation solution were defined.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{hniid=161,
author = {Gausemeier, Jürgen and Berssenbrügge, Jan and Binger, Volker},
title = {Future Potentials of Rail-Based Cargo Transportation for the Courier, Express and Parcel-Market},
booktitle = {World Congress on Railway Research},
year = {2001},
}