In its Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy , the European Commission targets an increase of the rail freight transport in Europe by 50% by 2030. To reach this goal, several technologies and methods will play a significant role: digitalisation and automation of rail freight operations lead to novel solutions with a major impact providing a critical opportunity to shift the freight transport from road to rail. Digital Automatic Coupling (DAC) is seen as a “game-changer” solution, a feasible and effective way for the transformation to full digital rail freight operations in Europe to deliver on the Green Deal and Digitalisation Package 2022 objectives. The advantages of DAC stretch across the rail freight sector, from railway undertakings and infrastructure managers including their staff to wagon keepers, society and environment, ultimately delivering benefits for rail freight customers. DAC makes automation possible, increases coupling efficiency and safety. Therefore, DACcelerate aims to manage and directly support the European DAC Delivery Programme in close cooperation with all stakeholders, while continuously engaging with experts and policy makers on EU & member state levels. It will provide strategies, methods and guidelines for successful and cost-efficient transition to fully automatized and digitalised rail freight transport. The project will tangibly illustrate the required future technology innovation bricks and respectfully updated operational procedures in an early phase of the roll-out and migration process. Hence, DACcelerate will establish and apply a framework allowing identification of bottlenecks, provide a means of cross-sectorial communication between stakeholders and develop a consolidated migration plan to tackle the individual challenges, while harmonizing technical approaches and developments. In order to perform these tasks in an efficient manner, the efforts will be aligned with existing European structures and activities with relevance for the EDDP.

The project DACcord provides with management competencies employed already in the precursor project DACcelerate to support to the EU-Rail JU for the continuation of the professional management of the activities of the European DAC Delivery Programme (EDDP), enabled by the EU-Rail JU and established in the EU-Rail JU work programme, in which European Rail Freight Sector and manufacturers are united to strive for the Europe-wide introduction of a Digital Automatic Coupler. DACcord describes in detail the required migration planning activities, leading to an industrial migration roadmap, as the EDDP focuses on the preparation of DAC migration & deployment from 2023 onwards. For doing this, the project will work closely with EDDP members and stakeholders to set up the overall task list in the actions defined by the EDDP. As alignment on the DAC/EDDP objectives throughout Europe is key to achieve consensus on objectives and specially to unlock the necessary funding for such a sector-wide transformation. DACcord establishes a mechanism for collecting and reporting the positions in the European stakeholder landscape to support the EU-Rail JU in providing recommended measures to the EDDP stakeholder management team..Professional communication material/tools and targeted dissemination activities will back the efforts. (Any of the described activities involving stakeholder management and dissemination actions will be coordinated and submitted for validation to the EU-Rail JU). To make DAC implementation economically possible, the project will further provide a draft concept on requirements for the DAC deployment funding mechanisms and potential options to fulfil them, to prepare the way for DAC deployment management entities in Europe. To align the different activities shaping the architectural and procedural DAC-related European Railway System (project TRANS4RM-R in the EU-Rail JU Flagship Area 5, the EU-Rail JU System Pillar (task 4) and EDDP), DACcord will support the EU-Rail JU in the cross-coordination and interfacing of the three entities and in the management and administration of its different decision-making bodies.