Last week, two of the many anticipated events for 5G Innovations for Connected and Automated Mobility took place: Stakeholder Workshop on 5G corridor deployment in the perspective of CEF Digital and the Recovery and Resilience Plans and Digital Around the World 2021. 5G-MOBIX was discussed in the presence of consortium members and various stakeholders.
Stakeholder Workshop on 5G corridor deployment in the perspective of CEF2-Digital and the Recovery and Resilience Plan organised by the 5G IA Working Group on 5G for Connected and Automated Mobility (5G CAM WG), and supported by ERTICO and DG CONNECT, received high interest from all stakeholders. The webinar was designed to allow all stakeholders to contribute to the concepts for 5G Corridor projects under CEF and RRF as well as relevant cooperation models.
After an introduction from ERTICO Innovation and Deployment Deputy Director Zeljko Jeftic and DG CONNECT Future Connectivity Systems Head Peter Stuckmann, two panel discussions were held. Before the first panel discussion, the speakers gave their statements. Giorgio Tosi Beleffi from the Italian Ministry of Economic Development presented some examples from planned 5G Corridors in Member states, followed by a statement by Deutsche Bahn on key elements for 5G Corridors along railways. The next statement was given by Fofy Setaki from 5G-MOBIX consortium partner Cosmote on service continuity across the border. She underlined the importance to address various ICT challenges as well as non-technical ones such as regulations for an effective and efficient 5G enabled CCAM. The last statement was addressed by Joost Vantomme, the current Smart Mobility Director at ERTICO Partner ACEA and the new ERTICO CEO starting from January 2022, who talked about the requirements and use cases from a user perspective and underlined the importance of a telco-auto-road collaboration and regular continuous communication in the frame of 5G Corridor Deployment. After the webinar, he indicated:
This workshop, enabled by the Commission’s DG CONNECT and ERTICO, comes at the right time. It offered a platform for exchanging experiences from the 5G Pilots in major transport sectors such as road and rail. ACEA welcomes the CEF-2 and RRF programmes and was able to voice the expectations of vehicle manufacturers for an uninterrupted seamless cross-border quality of service for connected and automated driving.
The statements for the second panel discussion were organised in three categories: views from road operators, technology and service providers, and actors in the Member States. Wim Vandenberghe from ERTICO Partner Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure showed examples for the role of road operators, whereas Javier Albares from ERTICO Partner HERE Technologies gave a statement about the opportunities for CAM service providers and Juliana Koza from ERTICO Partner Qualcomm presented technology solutions and options for service interplay along with the statements from other stakeholders. You can find the presentations and the recording of the webinar here.
The second event that took on Tuesday 12 October was Digital around the World 2021, an annual event where for 24 hours non-stop, top-level international speakers present and discuss the latest technological innovations and trends in digital transformation from the IoT to 5G, and network virtualization to smart services region by region, and time zone by time zone. This year’s edition had an entire session devoted to 5G functionality for cross-border connected automated mobility where 5G-MOBIX developments, deployments, cross-border connectivity challenges and their solutions were discussed by Fikret Sarikaya from consortium member GT-ARC / TU Berlin. His introduction was followed by Camille Plestan from ERTICO Partner and consortium member VEDECOM, who talked about how the project has managed to overcome COVID related challenges to perform relevant cross-border trials. The discussions on the trials continued with Konstantinos Katsaros from ERTICO Partner and consortium member ICCS, who presented preliminary results and evaluations obtained from the early trials in which the consortium aspires to ensure that the innovations within 5G-MOBIX are validated and proven to allow the realization of cross-border CAM. The conclusion was made by Olga Segou from the consortium partner INTRASOFT who evaluated the early trial results from a different angle where several barriers and enablers were found that need to be overcome or applied to allow the deployment of cross-border CAM services.
5G-MOBIX is working towards its vision to build a sustainable future for connected and automated vehicles carrying out various cross-border trials to identify and overcome obstacles along the journey. These two events, as well as all the other discussions 5G-MOBIX is involved in, help the project partners and stakeholders to keep the line of communication going and collaborate also with other ongoing projects on 5G Corridor Deployment.
