Most maintenance activities in the current railway system are carried out on a scheduled basis. This potentially means that components and sub systems are not replaced at the optimum time and that components fail between interventions. SMaRTE will provide the methodology for implementation of a Condition Based Maintenance system appropriate for the railway. This will allow maintenance to be tailored around the actual remaining life of key components and will reduce costs and improve reliability and availability. Knowledge and experience from other sectors will be extracted and new scientific methods for handling data and setting up architectures and intelligent systems to process data will be developed; appropriate to the railway system. Case studies will be designed and carried out for two different but typical passenger railways and lessons learned will be used to improve the system definitions. The final result of the SMaRTE project will be a CBM system which works for passenger railways and will result in reduced system costs and improved system reliability. The premise of SMaRTE (Human Factors) is that reducing customer cognitive effort is key to rail usability. Achieving a more streamlined process of accessing rail should increase its attractiveness. Whilst there is substantial evidence on the impact of factors such as fares / journey time on rail usage, the impact of more subtle factors deterring passengers from using rail are less understood. SMaRTE places the focus on the customer, utilising an innovative multi-disciplinary approach to understand the primary factors impacting on user decisions to choose rail (or an alternative) – and producing new quantitative evidence on the relative importance of those factors. The final result of SMaRTE will be a set of quantified factors influencing rail usability, and recommendations on how to decrease the cognitive effort and onward mobility for rail journeys through a “Smart Journey Vision” and rail map of measures.

RIDE2RAIL aims to integrate multiple (public/private/social) data sets and sources and existing transport platforms to promote an effective Ride Sharing practice of citizens, making it a complementary transport mode that extends public transport and rail networks. The RIDE2RAIL framework for intelligent mobility will integrate and harmonise real-time and diverse information about rail, public transport, ride-sharing and crowdsourcing in a social ecosystem, which will allow users to compare and choose between multiple options/services classified by a set of criteria – including environmental impact, travel time, comfort, cost – according to their preferences; this will make the travel experience both more positive for individual users, and globally more sustainable. This framework, consisting in a combined suite of travel offer classifications and software components, will be natively integrated into existing collective and on-demand transport services, connecting and reinforcing mobility offers, especially in rural and low-demand areas, in order to promote the access to high-capacity services (rail, bus and other public transport services), thanks to easy-to-use multimodal and integrated travel planning, booking and payment features. RIDE2RAIL will design, develop and test in real demonstrators a set of software components for the IP4 ecosystem, including advanced Travel Companion features and a crowd-based Transport Service Provider, which will foster the combination of flexible and regular multimodal mobility through an easy personalisation in diverse existing environments, thus facilitating the market uptake. RIDE2RAIL will deliver a set of validated proof of concepts and business cases envisaging future mobility scenarios, where advanced transport solutions will be seamlessly integrated into existing collective transport services (rail and others) in four (4) diverse cities in Europe: Padua, Athens, Brno and Helsinki.

During the past few years many projects and initiatives were undertaken deploying and testing Automated Vehicles (AVs) for public transportation and logistics. However in spite of their ambition, all of these projects stayed on the level of elaborated experimentation and never reached the level of a large-scale commercial deployment of transport services. The reasons for this are many, the most important being the lack of economically viable and commercially realistic models, the lack of scalability of the business and operating models, and the lack of user oriented services required for large end-user adoption of the solutions. The ULTIMO project will create the very first economically feasible and sustainable integration of AVs for MaaS public transportation and LaaS urban goods transportation. ULTIMO aims to deploy in three sites in Europe 15 or more multi-vendor SAE L4 AVs per site. A user centric holistic approach, applied throughout the project, will ensure that all elements in a cross-sector business environment are incorporated to deliver large-scale on-demand, door-to-door, well-accepted, shared, seamless-integrated and economically viable CCAM services. We target the operation without safety driver on-board, in a fully automated and mission management mode with the support of innovative user centric passenger services. ULTIMO’s innovative transportation models are designed for a long-term sustainable impact on automated transportation in Europe, around the globe and on society. The composition of the consortium ensures the interoperability between multiple stakeholders by making adoption of new technology at minimum costs and maximum safety. The integration of the ongoing experiments of previous AV-demonstrator projects ensures highest possible technical and societal impacts from the very beginning of the project, as well as during the project lifetime and even long after its completion.

The establishment of good governance will effectively secure the confidence of the industry to use the Interoperability Framework (IF) semantic technologies that will be established under the IP4 Shift2Rail program. The objective of the Governance of the IF for Rail and Intermodal Mobility (GoF4R) project is to define sustainable governance for the IF that will create the right conditions to introduce seamless mobility services and foster the development of multi-modal travel services. GoF4R will help to overcome obstacles currently impeding development of market innovation by fostering a large acceptance of the “semantic web for transportation.” The objectives will be achieved through a partnership of specialist participants including research institutions, a major European rail operator, industry associations representing the passenger and multi-modal transport sectors and public transportation authorities. Participants, who are also involved in the consortium of designers for the IF, will focus on the establishment of sustainable governance that will promote community confidence. The governance structure will create the basis for long term stability and controlled future evolution of the IF, promoting industry confidence so that it is attractive to invest in future products and services. The project encompasses all current and future stakeholders who will exploit the IF as described in the Shift2Rail Multi Annual Action Plan, contributing to the realisation of a distributed semantic “web of transport” integrating the TAP-TSI specifications as one of its elements. The governance models proposed in GoF4R will assure the interests of European travellers by fostering market uptake by mobility service providers. It will facilitate new business opportunities for improved mobility and travel related services and improve the incorporation of new stakeholders in the European arena by removing technological, administrative and economic boundaries.

The project SOLUTIONSplus aims to set up a global platform for shared, public and commercial e-mobility solutions, and to kick start the transition towards low-carbon urban mobility. The project work-plan encompasses city level demonstrations to test different types of innovative and integrated e-mobility solutions, vehicle and user-level demonstrations complemented by scaling up and replication activities. To appropriately address the call topic LC-GV-05-2019 and maximise its impact, SOLUTIONSplus brings together highly committed cities, industry, research, implementing organisations and finance partners. Through numerous synergistic projects, networks and a strong technical experience, the SOLUTIONSplus consortium will be able to deliver a highly ambitious project. Direct co-funding contributions will be provided by partner cities and SOLUTIONSplus works closely with UN Environment and the International Energy Agency (IEA) on a joint global urban e-mobility programme that will significantly boost replication and impact of this Innovation Action. Through the regional platforms, a global programme and local teams, the project aims to develop highly effective and innovative approaches to urban e-mobility ensuring that mobility systems and interventions from this project deliver on the Paris Agreement, meet the Sustainable Development Goals and address the New Urban Agenda. The Urban Electric Mobility Initiative (UEMI, launched by UN-Habitat) is the project coordinator, collaborating closely with the MobiliseYourCity and Decarbonising Transport partnerships. The consortium has developed a collaboration with a partner programme led by the IEA and UNEP funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which will turn the overall partnership into the leading global platform on urban electric mobility.