"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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