The European Management Committee (EMC) of UIC gathered in Wroclaw, Poland on 30 April.
The EMC is the Region’s strategic body and the place where CEOs address topics requiring a collective approach to deliver business value for the industry.
The meeting was warmly welcomed by UIC Chairman Alan Beroud (PKP), Europe Vice-Chairman Martin Frobisher (Network Rail), UIC Director General François Davenne, and UIC Director Europe Sandra Géhénot.
The following priorities, set out in the European roadmap, were addressed:
- The implementation of a Resilience Knowledge Hub
- The proposed Standardisation strategy for the Region
- Recommendations regarding FRMCS and the implementation of the Ticketing Roadmap
The topic of Resilience was introduced by Krzysztof Skrobich as topic sponsor and supported by Wassilios Tsolakidis.
Climate adaptation is an integral component for increasing resilience in railways. Currently, individual approaches in climate adaptation are still the norm, i.e., the risk assessment on infrastructure, choice and cost estimate of adequate adaptation measures/best practices. This leads, among others, to non-standardised methodologies, multiple risk modelling of same extreme climate event, and risk of missing out relevant best practices due to lack of bundled international exchange.
The idea of a UIC Resilience Knowledge Hub was introduced to cope with the above-mentioned challenges. High-level goals such as a common methodology for risk assessment, the central collection of adaptation measures/best practices, identification of current in gaps in studies, and an estimate of the monetary impact were agreed.
The meeting was also the opportunity to leverage findings from the European Commission (DG MOVE) “support study on the climate adaptation and cross-border investment needs to realise the TEN-T network”. The study points out that rail is the most endangered transport mode by extreme climate events with adaptation costs amounting to at least 27.4 billion EUR (total for all transport modes: 69.5 billion EUR) until 2075.
Laurent Schmitt, Deputy Chair of the Standardisation Platform, led a discussion on the underlying principles required for UIC, on behalf of its members, to strengthen the voice of railway operators in the elaboration of standards and on how sector initiatives can support fast implementation of interoperable solutions which contribute to driving down the overall cost of international operation.
The topic of FRMCS (Future Railway Mobile Communication System) was introduced by the meeting Chair, Martin Frobisher, who reminded participants of the complexity of industrial projects of that reach. Jean-Michel Evanghelou, UIC Director Telecom, Signalling and Digital Applications, and Director Financial Controlling and Project Operations, led the audience through the updated planning for the UIC specification programme, informed on reporting principles and reported on the collaboration with ERA, UNITEL and other key stakeholders.
Regarding Ticketing, Bertrand Minary, UIC Passenger Director, debriefed on the implementation of the ticketing road map and emphasised that 2025 is a pivotal year when the necessary processes and IT solutions are expected to be in place to deliver a seamless end-to-end international customer ticketing experience.
A major achievement to date is the full implementation of OSDM, now covering over 96% of rail traffic in Europe. OSDM provides a robust API-based specification for harmonized data exchange in sales, distribution, and ticketing. It is openly available on GitHub at www.osdm.io and is widely adopted across Europe by railway undertakings (RUs), IT vendors (B2B and B2C), and mobility platforms such as Samtrafiken in Sweden.
EMC members highlighted the Ticketing roadmap’s role in meeting customer expectations for seamless, multimodal digital experiences, particularly for users with reduced mobility or limited digital access. They confirmed their support for UIC to continue working on the interoperability between OSDM (Open Sales and Distribution Model) and Transmodel-based solutions (NeTEx and SIRI).
The next meeting of the European Management Committee will be held on 23 June 2025 in Rome.
