One of the major goals of the European Union's transport policy is to increase the market share of rail freight transports. With the Internet, globalization, and just-in-time production, the future of freight transport has moved to high-value and lightweight goods. Rail freight has had difficulty entering this market. Thus, a multipronged strategy is required for improving the rail freight market in which freight is consolidated and transported in Europe by encouraging new players to enter the market. A key pillar of this strategy is the introduction of freight exchanges that are based on principles similar to those of power exchanges. The latter are already well established and operational in the energy sector. This paper describes the market and operational requirements for efficient and reliable freight exchanges in the European freight market from which the rail sector can profit. Lessons learned from the energy sector were reviewed and applied in the context of the rail freight sector in this study. The analysis implies that for rail freight to function, as a pre requisite the freight exchanges would need to provide high liquidity in the market and be neutral to all parties, including shippers and forwarders. Furthermore, to facilitate competition, such exchanges would have to send price signals in the market like power exchanges do. The exchanges would allow automatic bidding, and the transaction process would be efficient and reliable. The rail freight operators would need to provide standardized indistinguishable products to serve as commodities on the freight exchanges.

The European Union (EU) is confronted with too low a share of inland rail freight transport. The implementation of two-sided online exchanges for rail-road freight transport could increase this share. However, such exchanges focusing on the EU market are mainly designed for single modes of transport. Their matching of supply and demand for multimodal services, especially including rail, is still in its infancy. This paper applies a maturity growth framework to speed up the implementation of such multimodal online exchanges. The framework integrates insights from industrial organization theory, platform economy theory, and maturity growth theory. Online exchanges, summarized in a new taxonomy, are compared to study their practices on matching supply with demand on the exchange, especially for multimodal services. Data is collected from case studies, exchange websites and semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows the emergence of new market actors and business models, including digital freight forwarders. These offer a variety of transport mode solutions for EU inland and EU related global freight transport. Maturity in matching supply and demand appears to result from clear objectives to provide benefits to the exchange participants, notably by digitizing the data for transaction completion and providing real time support for operational issues. In this context of rising online exchanges, especially in road and global multimodal transport (air, ocean, and road), the competition to capture a fragmented freight market seems to steadily increase. A similar maturity analysis of exchanges could not be found.

The use of online road freight transport exchanges (FTEs) in the EU-28 countries is widespread today, indicating a strong level of competition. Some exchanges attempt to distinguish themselves by developing new services, for example, warehousing services for logistics industries. In contrast, rail FTEs show a very low rate of success. Given the European Union policy goal on modal shift from road to rail and inland waterways for the next decade, there is a need to explore possibilities for improvement. This article, therefore, aims at specifying regulatory-, market-, technical- and operational success factors for implementing rail-based multimodal FTEs. It does so by exploring the success factors from established road FTEs and other successful network industries (energy and passenger transport) by performing a comparative analysis on the respective online exchanges. The theory on capability maturity development is applied, which assumes that actors engaged in a transition process steadily grow in terms of their capability to deal with various issues rising from the required transition goals. Based on the theory, a literature review and interviews, an initial capability maturity model (CMM) for FTEs is developed. Finally, learnings are summarized for the proposed multimodal FTE regarding rail and the regulatory topics for freight transport to serve as input for creating a generic CMM for online exchanges in subsequent steps of this research project. Similar research on maturity assessment of practices in online exchanges related to network industries could not be found.

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