Effectiveness of EU-funded R&I programmes from the perspective of the European railway sector stakeholders

The paper provides a methodology for measuring the adherence of Research & Innovation (R&I) actions in railways to the stakeholders’ requirements and expected benefits. After collecting the stakeholders’ requirements, the R&I objectives are extracted from high-level documents such as Europe's Rail Joint Undertaking Master Plan and Multi Annual Work Programme. Lastly, after standardization of the requirements and the technology concepts, a top-down analysis is performed. The results show that network management and vehicle technologies have the highest benefit for the stakeholders, and ERRAC and Regulatory Bodies’ requirements are well addressed. However, the end-users requirements are only partially fulfilled. The necessity of increasing multimodal transport and cooperation with other transport modes is shown, while stronger focus can be placed on the employees and education/training.