Towards rail-related multimodal freight exchange platforms: Exploring regulatory topics at EU level

The use of online road freight transport exchanges (FTEs) in the EU-28 countries is widespread today, indicating a strong level of competition. Some exchanges attempt to distinguish themselves by developing new services, for example, warehousing services for logistics industries. In contrast, rail FTEs show a very low rate of success. Given the European Union policy goal on modal shift from road to rail and inland waterways for the next decade, there is a need to explore possibilities for improvement. This article, therefore, aims at specifying regulatory-, market-, technical- and operational success factors for implementing rail-based multimodal FTEs. It does so by exploring the success factors from established road FTEs and other successful network industries (energy and passenger transport) by performing a comparative analysis on the respective online exchanges. The theory on capability maturity development is applied, which assumes that actors engaged in a transition process steadily grow in terms of their capability to deal with various issues rising from the required transition goals. Based on the theory, a literature review and interviews, an initial capability maturity model (CMM) for FTEs is developed. Finally, learnings are summarized for the proposed multimodal FTE regarding rail and the regulatory topics for freight transport to serve as input for creating a generic CMM for online exchanges in subsequent steps of this research project. Similar research on maturity assessment of practices in online exchanges related to network industries could not be found.