Deutsche Bahn is a bad joke nowadays. They even released some shorts on youtube with famous comedian Anke Engelke to laugh from themselves. But the situation is everything else than funny.
I design hardware, data science is not my thing. Is it that hard to collect all the delayed train events, categorize them. Create few groups like suicides, train breakdowns, infrastructure failures, too many passengers to close the doors, etc. And then fight the issues by groups defining oldest and possibly failing infrastructure and trains. And managing trains to squeeze everyone inside. Political failure is one thing, but some things can be solved by science.
There is no mystery of what's the cause here. That is widely known and reported.
It's lack of maintenance / modernization on the rail lines. This is 100% a political failure. If the money would be allocated towards that, the problem could be fixed in a few (IIRC 5-10) years.
Of course in addition towards that there is the additional political failure of wrong incentives which creates mechanisms like the "Pofalla-Wende" (delayed trains turning around mid-journey, so that the back journey doesn't count as delay) to game the bad statistics.
Well that thing is hard and requires an actual expertise. However if you throw around some serious money to bring over senior managers into a room to make fools of themselves by jumping in front of the top-level management + the new age coach, yelling "Ka mate, Ka mate, Pünktlichkeit und Verlass! Hiiii!", appropriating the native New Zealand culture along the way, you will instill "inspiring energy" that the senior managers will now "carry into their teams" consisting mostly of agile change managers, agile project managers, agile... whatever and magically, the trains will become more punctual. No need for that silly data science stuff obviously :)
I design hardware, data science is not my thing. Is it that hard to collect all the delayed train events, categorize them. Create few groups like suicides, train breakdowns, infrastructure failures, too many passengers to close the doors, etc. And then fight the issues by groups defining oldest and possibly failing infrastructure and trains. And managing trains to squeeze everyone inside. Political failure is one thing, but some things can be solved by science.