Digital Twins in Rail Freight - The foundations of a future innovation

The present master thesis addresses the demand for creative solutions towards increasing rail network capacities. It presents extensive research aimed at extending current knowledge by contributing a solution grounded on digital twin concepts. The thesis provides a well-founded answer to the research question of “what constitutes a good digital twin design to solve transparency-related issues in Dutch rail freight?” Specifically, this research proposes a design for a digital twin for transparency-related issues, intending to increase capacity on the current network. Following a multitude of research methods, this research triangulates the specific problems of the current IT landscape that could be solved by designing an architecture for a digital twin. Using literature reviews techniques and extensive case study research in the Dutch rail freight sector, a minimum-viable-product design for a twin is proposed. The development and the empirical evaluation of this proposal implemented the guidelines for Design Science Research as per Wieringa (2014). Validity aspects of the proposal were investigated through two expert panels.