ERTICO began 2022 with the team working on 15 projects and will close the year leading or collaborating on 20. This year, three ERTICO-led projects came to an end, and eight new ones started, where ERTICO is actively involved.
Impactful ending
ENSEMBLE finished on 31st March this year after spending 42 months on the advancement and implementation of truck platooning technology in Europe with the help of a V2V communication protocol supporting the correct behaviour and reaction of each of the trucks in the platoon for a good number of traffic use cases. The technology was put through rigorous testing and by the end of the project over 2000 km were covered by trucks of the seven leading European truck brands (DAF, Daimler, IVECO, MAN, Renault, Scania and Volvo) driving in platoons. The project’s results will be expected to have an impact on road safety, reducing emissions and lowering costs in the logistics supply chain.
The ARCADE Coordination and Support Action successfully concluded in July 2022. With the European state-of-the art CCAM Knowledge Base, Common Evaluation Methodology and Data sharing framework, the project has created an indispensable set of tools for the coordination of R&I in Europe, enabling the exchange of best practices and uniting the Connected, Cooperative, Automated Mobility (CCAM) community, supporting the commitments from EC, Member States and industry set out in the declaration of Amsterdam. The project also connected the EU community with international developments, mainly in the US and Japan and explored opportunities for future international collaboration. The project co-organised the EUCAD series of conferences in 2019 and 2021 with four Directorates General of the European Commission (DG RTD, DG MOVE, DG CONNECT and DG GROW). This has become a recognised event in Europe and beyond to discuss the most recent developments and policies in the area of CCAM.
5G-MOBIX concluded 47 months of activities on 30th September and submitted for an official review last week. The ambition and activities of 5G-MOBIX were designed to help deliver on the European Commission’s goal of “uninterrupted 5G coverage for Europe’s major transport corridors” by 2025. The project executed trials across Europe and Asia along cross-border (Spain-Portugal and Greece-Turkey) and urban (Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, China, Korea) corridors using 5G core technological innovations to qualify the 5G infrastructure and evaluate its benefits in the CCAM context. It also defined deployment scenarios and identified and responded to standardisation and spectrum gaps. Results from 5G-MOBIX pointed to three essential takeaways regarding 5G for CAM: that 5G delivers a capable solution for CAM, it is usable now, and which can further evolve.
Continuing on
Among the ERTICO-led projects carried over from the previous year are 5G-LOGINNOV, which aims to optimise freight and traffic operations at ports and logistics hubs through the use of 5G technologies; and FENIX, which has been developing the first European federated architecture for data sharing for the European logistics community. In May this year, a new ISO standard, ISO 23795-1:2022, for extracting trip data out of nomadic and mobile devices to estimate fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, which was introduced by the national standardisation body of Belgium in close cooperation with these two projects and partners from ERTICO’s previous projects CO-GISTICS and AEOLIX, was approved.
Both 5G-LOGINNOV and FENIX will end next year as will MODALES, another project coordinated by ERTICO, whose vision is to reduce air pollution from different types of road vehicles by encouraging drivers to modify their driving behaviour to lower emissions and carry out proper maintenance of their vehicles. To further its objective, this year, the project launched an awareness campaign for drivers in 11 languages.
ERTICO is part of the consortia of two other projects under the Clean and Eco-mobility Focus Area: SOLUTIONSplus, which combines demonstrations and capacity building initiatives around the world to kick start the transition towards low-carbon urban mobility, conducted its second training course in 2022 on the electrification of buses and their integration in cities’ public transport systems. ERTICO and the consortium members also teamed up with expert third parties for the third e-course of the project’s global e-learning programme on electric mobility. Starting in January, this new e-course will focus on Mobility as a Service, its role in decarbonising the transport system and its link with ITS solutions. The mission of eCharge4Drivers is to “make it easier to go green” by improving the electric-vehicle charging experience. This year the project launched trials at its 10 demonstration sites covering long and short distance trips in both urban and extra-urban environments across Europe.
CCAM projects have always featured prominently in ERTICO’s work plan and 2022 has been no exception. SHOW, a massive CCAM urban demonstration initiative with a consortium of 70 Partners from 13 countries, combines connected and automated mobility with electrification in the urban context. This year the project began public demonstrations at it trial sites: the first took place in March, in Tampere and the most recent one during the Urban Mobility Days in Brno. The SHOW project also held a three-day hackathon in Thessaloniki inviting bright minds “interested in exploring CCAM and advancing automated mobility to create a more sustainable world” for the benefit of all citizens, and organised various activities engaging local communities in the public demonstrations. The 5G META project aims to leverage car-captured data to innovative data-based CAM services and applications while ensuring data privacy, security, interoperability and ownership. With a view to empowering the automotive ecosystem from established industry players to new entrants, this past March, the project held a successful hackathon in Turin, and is now planning the organisation of the second one, which is likely to take place during the 2023 ITS European Congress in Lisbon.
When it comes to mobility data, NAPCORE is at the forefront as the world’s largest initiative to coordinate data platforms across the European National Access Points (NAPs) and National Bodies. The project held an important meeting in Paris , the Mobility Data Days 2022, hosting around 200 stakeholders and visitors from both the public and the private sectors, where topics such as TN ITS, the availability of micromobility data, the impact of the RTTI (real-time traffic information) Delegated Regulation on mobility stakeholders and Mobility Data Spaces were discussed by the mobility community. This project is of strategic importance as it aims to harmonise and build on the deployment of EU regulatory initiatives and bring all EU Member States towards deploying a harmonised approach on mobility data accessibility.
The other projects that ERTICO was involved in this year show how certain priorities, such as sustainability and awareness raising and capacity building for the deployment of smart mobility, are emphasising the need for a holistic approach to mobility innovation. The STORM project aims to support the transition of the transportation sector towards a sustainable freight future by identifying new data, developing novel methodologies, and creating use cases focusing on electrification and automation of freight and logistics transport. In June, ERTICO organised a workshop for STORM project partners and stakeholders to discuss the future trends and challenges in the freight and logistics sector and their impact on policies. In a similar vein, BOOSTLOG is mapping more than 160 projects funded by the European Union to identify successful implementation cases, including regulations, and will produce reports based on which stakeholders can act upon their priority needs. WeTransform is another project aiming to develop an action-oriented policy agenda based on a structured dialogue with stakeholders to address challenges and mitigate negative impacts of automation on the workforce across all transport modes. Finally, ERTICO has contributed to Ride2Autonomie, a project demonstrating the integration of autonomous shuttles into the transport system in ten EU cities, and participated in the Final Project Conference in TRA 2022.
New beginnings
The ERTICO team commenced work on eight new projects this year, one of which is being coordinated by ERTICO experts, who are also actively supporting the ERTICO Partners running the other seven. FAME is continuing the work started with past projects CATRE and ARCADE in establishing a European framework and methodology for testing and evaluation of CCAM on public roads, and improving cooperation, consensus building and data sharing for CCAM testing and large-scale demonstration activities in Europe. As co-organiser, led by ERTICO, the project has already begun preparations for EUCAD 2023, the EU conference on Connected and Automated Driving held every two years in Brussels.
Communication, dissemination, stakeholder engagement, expert-discussion events, international cooperation and outreach as well as standardisation tasks are among the activities ERTICO is leading with ERTICO Partners in seven other projects: NextETRUCK, coordinated by ERTICO Partner TNO, will provide a sustainable solution to bring zero-emission electric medium freight haulage with an increase of at least 10% energy efficiency compared to existing highest-end benchmark EVs of the same size category and operating for similar mission profiles. IN2CCAM, which is led by Politecnico di Bari, also an ERTICO Partner, focusses on integration and interoperability with the aim to accelerate the implementation of innovative CCAM technologies and systems for passengers and goods. The SINFONICA project focuses on accessibility and inclusivity of CCAM solutions and will provide recommendations and guidelines for socially innovative, citizen-oriented CCAM’s long-term planning and large-scale demonstrations in cities. PLOTO is a project that aims to increase the resilience of the Inland Water Ways (IWW) infrastructures and the connected land infrastructures, ensuring reliable network availability under unfavourable conditions, such as extreme weather, accidents and other kinds of hazards. PODIUM on the other hand, aims to advance a set of key technologies both in the physical and digital part of the infrastructure to address the challenges in road automation and telecommunications linked with connectivity, cooperation, data management, interoperability and reliability in order to foster the development of advanced CCAM solutions. The SUNRISE project will build upon HEADSTART, a previous EU-funded project, and other initiatives, to develop and demonstrate a commonly accepted, extensible Safety Assurance Framework for the test and safety validation of a varied scope of CCAM systems, including a broad portfolio of use cases and comprehensive test and validation tools. Finally, V4Safety will provide a prospective safety assessment framework that can handle a large variety of safety measures, ranging from in-vehicle safety technology, new vehicle types, infrastructure solutions to regulations that influence road user behaviour. Building an accepted and reliable method for the comparison of safety measures will allow setting policies for road safety and push for Vision Zero.
ERTICO Platforms
Apart for the work on EU-funded projects, ERTICO also made some news on the Innovation Platforms and Data Spaces that work closely with the ERTICO Partnership: TM2.0, SENSORIS, ADASIS, Data for Road Safety (DFRS), TN-ITS and MaaS Alliance. Both the public and the private sector have continued to work together towards agreeing protocols, specs and innovative concepts within the fora provided by these Data Spaces, while exploring new synergies and pathways in the mobility field.
You can keep up with all the news about the projects, Data Spaces and Platforms via their websites (new websites coming soon), where you will also find their social media listings.
Thank you for reading!
The ERTICO team would like to thank our Partners for reading and sharing their updates via the ERTICO website and newsletter. We look forward to working on together in 2023!
Best wishes for the end of the year and looking forward to more excellent cooperation in 2023.
The projects mentioned in this article are funded by the European Union.
