**6. Economic advantages and return-on-invest**

The freight Wagon 4.0 as well as the concept of industry 4.0 has economic advantages in many situations but not in all. Often, digitalised concepts are only paying off if, for instance, the cost of internet access is priced based on marginal costs, which is reasonable because a mobile phone base station is nearby anyway for other purposes. In the case of Wagon 4.0, the user base is limited, and economic feasibility must be checked for the individual use case. Normally, wagons that do not move very often are used as storage rooms rather than vehicles and will never give a positive return on investment. In all other cases, the operational setup and the chosen class determine the results. Class 1 wagons allow communication and certainly can also be position tracked via the mobile network. Thus, they may already allow some operational benefits (e.g., knowledge of miles travelled and adapted maintenance schedule), but savings are limited.

Bigger savings of operational costs will be found for class 2−4 wagons. This especially applies in cases when handling times for train inspection and brake checks can be significantly reduced. It is mostly not the costs of staff that count, since in many railway industry applications, staff are relatively cheap compared to the capital costs of assets used. More significant are the savings in turnaround times of trains and track occupancy, for example, in a port setup or a bimodal terminal. When applied together with loading site automation in a seaport environment, the benefits may even increase further. So intelligent freight wagons may be handled like autonomous container movers by the port automation system, removing inefficient manual interfaces and risky or heavy manual labour:

• Control of all vehicles can be centralized in the port operations centre with seamless integration of container handling and train movements.

*Automation of the Freight Wagon Subsystem DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110163*


#### **Table 1.**

*Time savings in port for container trains.*


The most important point is the higher throughput and efficiency. This especially applies to train turnaround times as well as track occupancy. Comparing the time needed for current (legacy) operations compared to a setup with wagons 4.0, significant time savings can be achieved, as given in **Table 1**.

The handling time of a 30-wagon trainset at the terminal facility falls from 4:00 to 1:15 hours. As can be seen, more than 66% of turnaround time may be saved, and therefore, rolling stock and track assets show significantly better utilisation. This especially becomes true if a complete trainset can be saved in the timetable.

Also, the port obtains benefits; without changing track infrastructure, the capacity of the facility increases by 200%. On an average port, this may generate an additional 20% savings on the cost of the track infrastructure.

Taking higher classes of Wagon 4.0 (e.g., class 5) into account, savings may not be as big for a standard use case from the railway operators' side, but they may enable rail services in cases where customers do not have their own shunting devices or in cases where crowded mainlines with lots of commuter passenger traffic will not allow freight services with conventional methods.
