Implications of New Technologies and Methods on Interoperability

Abstract

The paper deals with technological implications for a regional railway network, on the example of the ECO Railway Network (ERN). The magnitude of such impact is directly related to automation and interoperability in railways. From that stance, potential implications were studied from the two perspectives: (i) technological, to see whether the efficiency of railway network changes with the advent of new
technologies and (ii) technical, to see the level of the interoperability among regional railway networks to support the railway technological upswing. The paper asserts that the efficiency is one of potential implications of new technologies in railway. The latter has been examined in the context of infrastructure of the ERN.
Specifically, technological implications for the ERN resulted in changing its efficiency. Also, the ECO Transport Network (ETN) has been examined against implications for its efficiency driven by new innovations. The
implications for the latter have proved to be insignificant because the ETN largely remains dependent on economies of scale. In other words, the transport network performance will always negatively correlate to the
increase in the quantity of network users (Shaofeng, 2013). On the other side of the spectrum, the implications for the ERN proved visible as is efficiency increased when new innovations solutions were in. From the
technical perspective, the interoperability has been considered as a tool to initiate the influx of new technological solutions in the ERN at the back of the current stage of the development of the overall ETN. The paper resulted in developing the interoperability model for coordination of railway operations in the region to increase efficiency at technical level.