Users, Safety, security and Energy In Transport Infrastructure

Project Information

USE-IT

Grant agreement ID: 653670

DOI

10.3030/653670

Project closed

EC signature date 24 March 2015

Start date 1 May 2015

End date 30 April 2017

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost

€ 955 624,72

EU contribution

€ 955 624,72

Coordinated by

FORUM DES LABORATOIRES NATIONAUX EUROPEENS DE RECHERCHE ROUTIERE FEHRLAISBL
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - USE-IT (Users, Safety, security and Energy In Transport Infrastructure)

Reporting period: 2016-05-01 to 2017-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

"The transport network across Europe faces challenges relating to carbon reduction targets, energy security, and depletion of natural resources, without sacrificing its efficiency and compromising mobility. In addition, the road and rail infrastructure in particular are ageing and require renewal. Simultaneously, advances in sensors, mobile communications, smart ticketing and ‘big data’ offer the potential for customers to become an active part of the transport operations system and have the information to make decisions – for transport to enable ‘mode agnostic’ personal and business travel and – for freight operators to have more resilience and better reliability in their systems.
The European transport system faces also an unavoidable societal challenge, which is achieving new levels of resource-efficiency, environmental-friendliness, safe and seamless transport for the benefit of citizens, the economy and society.In order to tackle the challenges and reap the benefits outlined above, infrastructure owners and transport operators will be required to work together, along with other crucial stakeholders, to share knowledge and cooperate in a way that will be beneficial to all parties, and this proposal seeks to facilitate this. The vision for the project is to better understand the common challenges experienced across transport modes, bring representatives of transport modes together to share experience and skills
and to develop a set of common research objectives. In the longer term, the ambition is that there will be a vibrant community of stakeholders from a range of transport modes, sharing experiences and technologies, undertaking joint research projects and creating a European transport network that is safer, more secure, with lower carbon emissions and which is focussed on user needs.
The USE-iT project (together with a ""sister"" project - FOX - Forever open infrastructure across all transport modes) has identified 42 research challenges, covering:
- user information, safety and security, energy and carbon (USE-IT project)
- construction, maintenance, inspection, and reuse and recycling (FOX project).
All challenges cover at least two modes and have been mapped against four domains: infrastructure, technology, governance and customers and against four levels of applications: urban mobility, long distance corridors, multi-modal hubs and system level.
The outline research programme for the challenges has been proposed between 2017 and 2030 and beyond and identified according to TRL levels of ≤ 5, 6-8 and 9. For some early-stage applications considerable fundamental research will need to be undertaken, followed by development and testing, with deployment towards 2030, whilst other technologies are more advanced or are more mature in other sectors and deployment could be possible in the early to mid-2020s.




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Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

At the beginning of the USE-IT (and FOX) project, a preliminary investigation into the different technologies and approaches in all transport modes in the various topic areas (for USE-IT: user information, safety and security, energy and carbon and for FOX: construction, maintenance, inspection, recycling and reuse) was performed. A considerable number of these technologies were then validated and improved with stakeholder interviews and a stakeholder workshop in January 2016. These technologies were then prioritised by the partners, along with further interviews and a second stakeholder workshop held in September 2016. A prerequisite was that each challenge covers at least two transport mode, resulting in a total of 42 challenges identified across the three topic areas in USE-iT and the four topic areas in FOX.
As a means of keeping the project active beyond the funding period, it will be facilitated by the FORx4 (Forever Open Road, Rail, River and Runway) initiative. It was a stated aim in the proposal that FEHRL will use the output roadmap to help build the vision of FORx4 and to develop a comprehensive FORx4 roadmap and it is considered that in the longer term, there will be a benefit from incorporating the USE-iT and FOX roadmaps into a larger scheme that pre-dates the CSAs and which will go on for several years. This will both help in ensuring that the results of the project are implemented and exploited following the end of the projects, whilst also benefiting from being associated with the existing FORx4 and FOR (Forever Open Road) brands.
The various industry partners will use the roadmaps generated by USE-IT to inform their internal business plans and their own industry sector plans, as many members of FEHRL are also members of other technology platforms. It is anticipated that certain organisations will use the roadmaps to inform research priorities at a national or regional level.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project has produced a number of specific outputs. They include:
a) Collation of reports in each of the three topic areas (user information, safety and Security and energy and carbon) on the common challenges and opportunities across the modes and domains.
b) For each topic area, the project has developed a set of common research challenges, which covers at least two transport modes.
c) The project has developed a Roadmap detailing the research strategies and implementation stages to ensure greater co-modal cooperation on customer, safety, security and energy matters.

The final results of the USE-IT project (Summary results of recommendations) will be disseminated to public and private transport infrastructure operators, research funders and providers, construction and technology companies amongst others, as a document produced and endorsed by their peers on the challenges and opportunities facing the transport sector and will help inform their research and investment decisions.
One of the key outputs of the project, the development of multi-modal (at least two modes) research calls, will be used as an investment plan to both research funders and as an investment or strategy document for public and private infrastructure owners and operators and contractors.

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