Issues on railway wagon asset management using advanced information systems

Wagon fleet is an essential component of the railways business. Motivated by the recent concern on freight wagon management in Europe and based on the experience from the deployment and pilot demonstrations of an advanced wagon management system in Europe, the current work presents main technological and organizational issues associated with a wagon pool, created and used by a railway operator partnership. The results include the identification of the essential hardware and software requirements for the implementation of such a system (user/wagon reservation, track-and-trace and energy-saver equipment, loading/unloading sensors, wagon dispatching and delay management functionalities) as well as the outcome of the investigation of significant organizational aspects of the system (imbalance between wagon offer and wagon demand, fair allocation of benefits among the users of the system, savings that can be achieved thanks to estimated time of arrival information, consideration of reliability metrics into the optimal empty wagons allocation problem).