Rail freight transportation is a system service where a multitude of players, participants and systems providers bear a high degree of responsibility for its attractiveness and performance. It shows high efficiency as transportation means, in terms of land use and energy consumption and low greenhouse gas emissions. However rail’s market share of freight transportation and its economic efficiency continues to be limited. Aimed at overcoming such uncertainty, this project addresses one of the most important key resources for further developing rail freight transportation: the optimization of the performance of the rail freight wagon. The continuous pressure on environmental issues and energy efficient transport is forcing the rail transportation sector to enhance the rail logistics services and to incorporate innovative solutions to improve load capacity to keep the “best-in-class” position and, therefore, acquiring a much privileged position beyond alternative terrestrial transport source, as truck transportation. Thus, aimed at optimizing rail freight transportation, the main objective of this project is to holistically address the aspects that may improve freight wagon performance: enhanced logistics, improved multimodal operative, higher load capacity, optimized filling/emptying time and flexibility to transport multi-products. This project aims to achieve such optimization by combining industrial expertise on the freight wagon design and construction, advanced materials for lightweight construction and logistics with the research capabilities to incorporate innovation solutions and optimize material performance.

The main objective of this Project is the development of a methodology and ICT tools which will allow an advanced simulation of intermodal railway logistics platforms models in order to support tasks related to both design and planning phases. Using the combination of demand/economic/capacity models as main inputs, an evaluation of scenarios will be possible by means of the comparison of an underlying Building Information Modeling output composed of different data sets such as CAPEX, OPEX or energy efficiency. Moreover, using these new design tool an improvement of the QOS and boost transhipment operations between rail and road transport will be achieved. Above BIM2Operate translate and demonstrate the benefits of BIM during the operational phase, the tools can be extended with a specific simulator to get other indicators about the performance of the operations. The scope of this proposal addresses two of a maximum of five aspects expected by the European Commission: - Development of whole system planning environments (based e.g. on virtual design concepts such as BIM - Building Information Modeling) to support the streamlined delivery of infrastructure projects from concept to deployment. In this respect, the rail sector deserves particular attention. - Solutions for advanced infrastructure capacity planning and modeling for all transport modes.