Digitalization and innovation

The regional transport market continued to be characterized by dynamic conditions in 2025: increasing competition, sustained cost pressure and growing demands on IT and digitalization. DB Group’s strategic orientation and DB Regional’s focus on the “Strong Regions” guiding principle underline the aspiration to make regional mobility services future-proof, sustainable and customer-centric. In the CIO&CDO division of DB Regional, activities in 2025 focused on this environment in terms of organization and topics covered in order to leverage opportunities at an early stage and address challenges effectively.

The following progress was made in 2025:

• New digitalization strategy: In 2025, DB Regional established a new digitalization strategy as the foundation of its innovation focus. It integrates a wide range of perspectives from the regions and specialist departments in the rail and bus line of business. The strategy defines technically derived digitalization targets and strengthens new, product-oriented cooperation models. It pursues a consistent focus on local operations-oriented added value and economic benefits.
• Reorganization of the CIO&CDO division: DB Regional’s CIO&CDO division was also comprehensively reorganized as of July 1, 2025. The switch to a product logic allows services to be aligned to regional requirements and the demands of the market to an even greater extent. At the same time, governance functions were sharpened in order to support the implementation of the digitaliza­­tion strategy in the new, more regionally focused environ­ment through clear management, standardized processes and reliable quality assurance. This served to enhance the struc­tures and framework conditions for efficient, impact-oriented digitalization at DB Regional.
• RBL Regional: With RBL Regional, DB Regional is supporting the assisted monitoring and control of the operating situation. Through the integration of existing applications and the targeted enhancement of the application landscape, deviations from planned operations can be intuitively recognized, measures can be reliably derived, coordinated and implemented, and all of the parties involved can be informed as required. RBL Regional actively sets itself apart from the previous performance-critical system landscape, which was heterogeneous and sometimes less user-friendly.
• Digital Schedule: The “Digital Schedule” – a joint initiative of DB Regional, DB Long-Distance and DB Systel – bundles all of the schedule information relevant to train runs in a modern application. As an additional module of the “FahR” Regional application, multiple unit drivers receive schedules, multiple unit instructions and operational messages that are always clear and up-to-date. The app ensures that all information is available in the right place at the right time. The regional rollout took place in several waves from July to November 2025, including training employees and equipping them with new tablets.
• KIRA: With the KIRA pilot project for autonomous local public transport, DB Regional Road is expanding its operational capabilities to include the planning, control and operation of autonomous transport at Level 4. Level 4 enables driverless transport in clearly defined operating areas with technical supervision from the train control center. Together with the Rhein-Main-Verkehrsverbund transport association, runs using a total of six autonomous vehicles have been offered to selected test customers in the Offenbach district and in the north of Darmstadt since spring 2025 – currently still with a safety driver. The necessary qualification profiles and operating processes were set up for the first time as part of the project and developed iteratively.