The main objective of Ben@Rail is supported by the specific objectives detailed below:

Specific objectives of Ben@Rail:

To identify, in joint collaboration with ERRAC members, the rail sector stakeholders’ requirementsvis a vis EU-funded research; 

To review, analyse and support Europe’s Rail JU Master Plan in light of the stakeholders’ expected benefits and wider societal challenges;

To collect, analyse, and elaborate available data from rail R&I activities to measure the EU funding programmes levels of efficacy in responding to the identified societal issues;

To apply a scientifically proved methodology to assess the effects of R&I activities on the stakeholders’ expectations;

To communicate and promote the outcomes of the analysis to the scientific community, rail stakeholders and policy makers in the new framework of Europe’s Rail Master Plan.

This project has received funding from the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101046258 Ben@Raill.

Here you can find our deliverables and publications for you to download.

Deliverable D 1.1  Simplified stakeholder tree and weighting matrix of requirements

Deliverable D 2.1 Structured overview of R&I objectives and their underlying benefits

Deliverable D 4.1 Project Management and Quality Assurance Plan

Deliverable D 4.2 Plan for the Dissemination, Exploitation and Knowledge Transfer of the Project’s Results

Deliverable D 4.3 Summary of dissemination and exploitation activities

Effectiveness of EU-funded R&I programmes from the perspective of the European railway sector stakeholders

Publication in the German paper “ ETR – Eisenbahntechnische Rundschau“ from December 2022 ETR NR. 12.  With the title:“Wirksamkeit von EU-F&E-Programmen aus Sicht der Stakeholder des Eisenbahnsektors“

The Final Event of the Shift2Rail JU-funded Ben@Rail project and its complementary project IMPACT-2 was held in Brussels and online on the 14th June 2022.

During the meeting in Brussels, Armando Carrillo Zanuy, the project coordinator, gave an overview of the project’s progress, with a particular focus on the project activities, its methodology and the final top-down analysis. Ms Judith Sandor, Shift2Rail JU programme manager presented the Shift2Rail and Europe’s Rail JU programmes, and how Ben@Rail fits into this context

The final event proved to be the perfect instance for a discussion on the strength of the project results and on the opportunities that the project analysis opens for the sector. From everybody involved in Ben@Rail a sincere thank you to all participants for their valuable feedback.

To find out more about Ben@Rail, please visit Zenodo and the project webpage. For further information, please contact Alessio Tardivo at alessio@eurnex.eu.


– For the future Europe’s Rail Joint Undertaking to be successful, the innovations stemming from its Master Plan must adhere to the needs of railway stakeholders and final users.

Ben@Rail contributes to the success of the new Undertaking by applying a scientifically proven methodology to quantify the efficacy of EU-funded R&I activities.

To reach this objective, Ben@Rail will provide evidence-based research to assess the extent to which the foreseen innovations of Shift2Rail and its successor respond to clear societal cases and stakeholders’ and users’ expectations.

To achieve this, Ben@Rail, in close cooperation with the European Rail Research Advisory Council (ERRAC), will develop a top-down analysis grounded on two elements. On the one side, the requirements of the rail sector stakeholders vis a vis EU-funded research are identified. On the other side, the sector’s strategic documents are reviewed and analysed in light of the stakeholders’ expected benefits and the wider societal challenges to extract objectives, key technical concepts and development areas that will affect and shape the Railway System of the future. The resulting analysis will assess the adherence of EU-funded R&I activities to the stakeholders’ requirements, thus evaluating the expected outcomes of the future new Joint Undertaking Master Plan.

Ben@Rail will develop a scientific, innovative framework for the evaluation of EU-funded projects based on the stakeholders’ requirements. One of the strengths of this framework relies on its possible application in other sectors to comprehensively investigate future funding R&I programmes.

Ben@Rail will benefit from a consortium composed of three renowned scientific centres in the field of rail research, committed to the mentioned actions and towards the maximisation of the project’s impacts by communicating and promoting its outcomes to the scientific community, rail stakeholders and policymakers.

The main objective of Ben@Rail is to strengthen the effectiveness of EU-funded R&I activities in the railway research domain amongst the rail sector stakeholders, in order to ensure a tight adherence of the innovations stemming from Europe’s Rail Joint Undertaking (ERJU) and its Master Plan to the needs of railway stakeholders and final users.

Ben@Rail intends to quantify the efficacy of EU-funded R&I activities, providing evidence-based research to assess the extent to which the foreseen technological and operational innovations resulting from the work of S2R, and expected from the Master Plan of its future successor, respond to a clear societal case and produce benefits to the railway stakeholders and users.

To support this objective, Ben@Rail aims at developing a top-down analysis of the railway stakeholders’ masterplan goals, indicating whether the technological and general concepts that are supposed to be developed by Europe’s Rail-funded projects meet the stakeholders’ expectations.