Periodic Reporting for period 2 - X-TEAM D2D (eXTEnded AtM for Door2Door travel)
Reporting period: 2021-06-01 to 2022-09-30
The project provided and validated a Concept of Operations (ConOps) for seamless door-to-door mobility in urban and suburban (up to regional and country- wide level) environment, targeting the connection of a metropolis with the surrounding area (up to country-wide level) and taking into account the transportation and passengers service scenarios for the next decades, according to baseline (2025), intermediate (2035) and final (2050) time horizons.
The integration of ATM and air transport into overall intermodal transport system has been considered not only with respect to currently available transportation alternatives on the surface and water but also with respect to emerging mobility forms envisaged for the next decades, so providing a rational insight into the future of multimodal mobility in European cities, taking also into account the emerging concept of Urban Air Mobility and its integration with the other transportation means into a unique mobility as a service concept.
X-TEAM D2D achieved objectives that are relevant in the overall interest of the European community include the following ones.
• Development of a simulation-based approach for validating the proposed ConOps, considering the most relevant elements of the transport in the future, such as interfaces mode-mode, high-level network model, passenger-centric paradigm.
• Identification of areas where the travel is not as smooth as expected by considering passengers’ perspective, and benefitting also from the support of relevant stakeholders involved in the project Advisory Board and Passengers Advisory Group.
• Building-up a framework to increase the efficiency of the overall transport chain by improving the interoperability of the different modes of transport (already available today and/or available up to the final target 2050 time horizons), while at the same time increasing environmental sustainability, making an efficient use of the existing and future infrastructures.
In the ConOps, specific focus has been devoted to the description of the role that ATM and aviation and UAM and U-space can play in the integrated transport system. The final concept of Total Traffic Management, then, integrated such roles in the final target Mobility as a Service environment. Detailed consideration of the air mobility role in the integrated system is reflected in all the technical deliverables, according to their specific focus.
The project implemented a simulation-based approach in the validation of the proposed ConOps, developing dedicated simulation platform and using it to simulate all the use cases and scenarios that have been designed in the project.
The project implemented a dedicated communication, exploitation and dissemination strategy in terms of a threefold approach, clearly identifying the specific activities related to each one of these domains, targeting them to the different and interested stakeholders. Communication addressed the website and the social media presence, by means of the Twitter channel and the dedicated LinkedIn project page. In terms of dissemination, the project provided several publications in journals and conference proceedings as well as presentations in conferences. About exploitation, the project has been highly committed to disseminate the information relevant to project execution and results, and great attention has been given to make industry aware about the X-TEAM D2D results.
The addressed ConOps has been designed with specific reference to the Urban and Extended Urban and Regional transport scenario in Europe, considering incremental implementation of the proposed ConOps over three layers: baseline (2035), intermediate (2035), final (2050).
The simulation model used for the validation of the ConOps benefitted from available data and was able to generate diverse types of data that supported the validation of the ConOps. The development of the simulation model has been fundamental for investigating the future performance of the multimodal system developed.
With the use of the simulation model for validating the ConOps, the consortium applied the data farming techniques for validating the ConOps and for identifying potential problems and interrelationships of future processes.
X-TEAM D2D, therefore, proposed, for the first time, an all-in-one approach (ConOps and Validation tool). This methodology was innovative on its own since, apart for performing the specification and analysis of future operations, it provided a validation tool which increased transparency, replicability and accuracy in the outcomes of the project, by using an innovative simulation methodology for validating the ConOps developed during the project.