In early November, a new participant appeared on the railway transportation market — the Digital Operator. He also researched the operator market, telling Argus about CEO Alexey Vinnikov.
In the end, you admired it. What are the goals and objectives of this enterprise?
In short, the main task of the Central Railway is to increase the efficiency of using freight wagons on the Russian Railways network, taking into account the optimization of the transportation process to reduce the costs of operators and shippers. The prerequisites for this decision were that over the past five years, the productivity of rolling stock has steadily declined, as a result, the size of the unclaimed fleet has increased, which has continued to grow, taking into account the purchase of new wagons by operators. As a result, the total fleet has reached a certain critical mass — about 1.4 million units, when the current infrastructure capacities of Russian Railways are no longer able to ensure the rhythmic movement of rolling stock. According to the laws of economics, an increase in the number of wagons in operation should reduce the cost of their use, but now the situation is reversed — the more wagons, the higher the cost, and, as a result, the transport component in the price of transported goods increases. Thus, the issue of optimizing the transportation process on the railway network has become one of the key issues in the country's economy as a whole.
Even at the stage of creating an operator business, many people wondered how, on the one hand, to maintain a highly competitive operating market, and on the other hand, to use the best practices in motion control technology. By and large, this is a mathematical problem.: how to transport more cargo while minimizing empty mileage and wagon turnaround time. Its solution is suggested today by "digit", more precisely, the ability to use big data, build mathematical models and create digital solutions. We analyzed the network and found a number of optimization points for transportation technology. These are oncoming empty runs, opportunities for transportation routing, reduction of sorting, and so on.
To realize the potential of such optimization, a digital rolling stock management platform has been created using a fleet depersonalization approach. I am convinced that our solution will allow us to quickly improve the technology of the transportation process, and with the growing number of participating operators, the effect will only grow. For example, if we see that one operator has a wagon at a certain point, but there is no loading, we involve him on a flight according to an already agreed request for transportation of another operator's GU-12. Over the past couple of years, the market has been actively using this technology with the direct support of Russian Railways, exchanging rolling stock.
