**3.1 Survey**

The implementation of the survey was based on an online European Survey platform. The implemented survey aims to collect data about the needs of enterprises of the railways and multimodal sector. It consists of 3 parts: the introduction, the SME profiling and the SME technological assessment.

The introduction section briefly describes the project, its aims and the purpose of the survey. Additionally, users of the questionnaire are presented with the GDPR statement of the STARS survey. The GDPR statement explains in detail the reasons for collecting the data of the SMEs, how this data is going to be used and by whom and how it will be stored. Users of the survey are also requested to accept and comply with the privacy statement.

As of 27 June 2022, 128 enterprises had answered the survey. After filtering out those outside the scope, a sample of 106 SME companies working or wishing to work in the Railway and Multimodality sector and located in the COSME countries was obtained.

#### **3.2 Questionnaire structure and deployment process**

The main section of the STARS survey questionnaire is focused on the evaluation of the status, the needs and the obstacles faced by the SMEs and is structured in the following sections:


The process of deploying the survey, result collection and analysis included the following steps: (1) a requirement analysis and specifications for the survey itself, (2) an analysis of the available survey platforms and tools in order to select the most suitable one, (3) an iterative design and authoring of the survey in collaboration with the partners of the STARS consortium, (4) dissemination of the survey through the partner network, (5) initial analysis and classification of the answers data, (6) feedback on the analysis of the answers by the focus groups at regional level and (7) final version of the analysis and grouping of SMEs.

The methodology used for designing and running the survey as well as for the analysis of the answers received can be summarised as shown in **Figure 1**.

The survey was made available online on the 8 February 2022.

The design of the survey was an iterative process between STARS consortium members as well as external experts of the Advisory Group and the supporting Digital Innovation Hubs.

The Advisory Group consists of experts from the STARS consortium, as well as external experts from European initiatives that have committed through the signature of Letters of Support and other relevant European organisations that have been invited to become part of it (IoT4Industry Partnership, ECSO, EU Blockchain

*Analysis on the Technological Needs and Requirements of SMEs in Rail DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110155*

#### **Figure 1.**

*Survey design methodology and timeline.*

Observatory & Forum, EuroXR, ADMA and others). The role of all the entities involved in the development of the survey was to provide advice on how to structure the initial survey to SMEs and how to analyse its results.

In order to better understand the current industrial meta-ecosystem, similar questions to EU statistics were used, such as the EU Flash Eurobarometer 486 "SMEs, start-ups, scale-ups and entrepreneurship".

A first analysis of the early results took place in March by querying the database of the survey and producing statistics on the answers data.

For the purposes of the analysis and classification of the answers of the survey, we have followed the following workflow consisting of three phases:


Cleaning consisted of: (1) deleting blank rows, that is, respondents who did not accept the analysing of their data, or all respondent who were not in the scope of the project, (2) dividing multiple choice questions into binary statements, (3) transforming scale text responses into numerical scales, (4) changing fraction to decimal and (5) replacing null answers by mean values.

After the import and cleaning of raw data, some statistics and more complex calculations were carried out: mean values by countries and classification and clustering.

The data analysis step of the workflow following the steps of data cleaning and data transformation includes the execution of an analysis algorithm that computes the distances of SMEs based on their answers and groups them accordingly. The results of both analyses are explained in detail in Section 4 of this document.
