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Harmony at Transport Research Arena | TRA Conference 2022

  • Harmony 

An intense and very productive week for HARMONY H2020 Project at the Transport Research Arena – TRA 2022! This year’s Conference and Exhibition focus was on European research and innovation to boost efficient and green mobility. The conference took place at the Lisbon Congress Centre from 14-17 November.

TRA 2022 is the opportunity for researchers, policymakers and industry representatives to get together and contribute to the discussion on how research and innovation can reshape the transport and mobility system. At this conference, several projects get the chance not only to showcase their developments, innovation, and market solutions but also to share best practices of policies and deployments.

Moving together – reimagining mobility worldwide

Under the motto Moving together – reimagining mobility worldwide, TRA 2022 brings together experts to discuss the most important topics for the evolution of sustainable, low-carbon mobility, digital innovation and solutions that contribute to policy decisions around these issues.

Why is Harmony participating?

During the four-day conference, HARMONY participated in several activities, broadening the spectrum of the discussion, bringing also the experience of our partners, development and innovation, as well as recommendations to improve urban mobility in a sustainable way.

Dedicated to making an environmental impact, the HARMONY puts emphasis on green mobility: ¨SUSTAINABILITY MATTERS. We are committed to advancing sustainable mobility towards a safer and healthier life in our cities and regions. During its lifetime, HARMONY aims to: -15% REDUCE CONGESTION, -10% REDUCE NOISE LEVEL, + 10% INCREASE TRIPS WITH LOWER EMISSIONS, +10% INCREASE INTERMODALITY¨

Join us for a tour of the activities in which we took part in this 2022 TRA edition!

November 14

The European Commission and Cluster 4 Fronts held the Special Session “Traffic modelling for demand responsive transport and other new forms of mobility”, Moderated by HARMONY´s Project Officer Thiago Tavares, in which Vicent Pastor, Chief Innovation Officer at ENIDE  shared the experiences during the HARMONY project regarding how to involve different stakeholders in the project, the importance of collaboration and creating clusters and synergies to exploit the results of the project.

The experts examined the future of the network and traffic management, and the ways it will shape cities. The panel of this session included the projects that make up the 4 Front cluster ORCHESTRA, TANGENT, DIT4TRAM, FRONTIER projects and was attended by approximately 60 people. 

The session also explored how to tackle new technological, societal, operational, business and governance challenges and opportunities. The projects presented further topics including System engineering architecture, Resilience, Trustworthiness, Data sharing Governance, User behaviour and acceptance, multimodality, upscaling etc. to implement the network and traffic management of the future.

In the many discussions and several round tables I took part in on the results of running Transport R&D&I initiatives, there was a common understanding of the need to enhance project clustering and stakeholder engagement beyond technology development, as a key for systemic Innovation to be achieved.

Vicent Pastor,

ENIDE

At the Auditorium II, Konstantinos Kamargiannis from UCL presented a poster about Moby App under sub-theme 1.1.1 ´User-focus and inclusive mobility´

MOBYAPP PLATFORM

MobyApp platform consists of three key technology components: i) Admin App, which creates and sets up all the surveys based on the needs of the client; ii) Client App, which provides a survey management tool to those who organise the survey (the clients of MOBY X) to supervise the progress of the survey and check key statistics of the collected data via infographics; iii) Mobile App (Android and iOS) that collects raw data, such as GPS, GSM, Wi-Fi and accelerometer.

November 15

As part of the Special Interest Session: AutoMATE Concertation for Smart, Green, Automated and Integrated Transport.

Supported by the European Commission’s Horizon Results Booster programme, the H2020-projects SHOW, AVENUE, HARMONY, SPROUT, FRONTIER, and PASCAL join forces in a Project Group called AutoMATE based on commonalities between their work in the field of Automated and Integrated Transport. In this session, the audience learned about AutoMATE and how concertation between the projects helps tackle collective challenges at technological, business, societal and policy levels. With its disruptive format, the session transversally addressed these challenges with the possibility for the audience to interact with the experts.

  • Topic 1 – ´Technological challenges on Automated Vehicles, Infrastructure Setup and Datavehicle & infrastructure levels, fleets management & simulations´: on behalf of the Harmony H2020 team, Vicent Pastor, from ENIDE joined the discussion giving inputs on ´Learnings from pilots on the technological challenges of AVs and drones´.
  • Topic 2 –  ´Societal & business challenges – Understanding people’s and stakeholders’ needs´: on behalf of the Harmony H2020 team, Vicent Pastor, from ENIDE participated in the discussion giving inputs on ´Stakeholder’s needs related to modelling and simulation tools for city planning as well as stakeholders´ perception of adoption of AVs and drones for goods delivery // Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning (SUMP) Guidelines and policy recommendations for the use of new mobility solutions. Data collected from the public. Interviews from different users. Gamification of the survey´.

 

The possibility to share experiences from use cases and/or pilots such as Trikala, Rotterdam and Oxforshire, as well as to understand and apply methodologies to involve citizens in these contexts through surveys, gamification and other tools, helps to improve decision-making, put the public in a better position to make informed decisions.

At the Poster Area, Efficient and innovative logistics 1.4, Larissa Eggers researcher at Significance presented two posters:

  • ‘An empirical demand model for e-commerce and shopping trips´ 
  • ´Forecasting parcel deliveries in an urban freight simulator for the province of Zuid-Holland

There were definitely some interesting discussions, though it was surprising to find the almost negligible overall emission reductions in the Zero-emission zone scenario (emissions by vehicles that are forced to take detours around the ZEZ offset the savings in the zone). Indeed, there is still a lot to be done in research and innovation to boost efficient and green mobility.

Larissa Eggers,

Significance

November 17

The Agora area of the European Comission stand revieves HARMONY H2020, to discuss ´Policies and Economics for a Competitive Europe´: Vicent Pastor, from ENIDE presented the innovations of the project and highlighted the project specifications regarding The best practices for SUMPs: The SUMPs Topic Guide (TG).

The EC stand offered 15 live demos and presented 32 EU-funded Research & Innovation projects that shared experiences and results.

Keep following HARMONY on Twitter and LinkedInto stay updated with its next developments and events.

Bonus track! You can find all videos related to the project and the Model Suite on our YouTube Channel. Don’t miss our news!