BIN2BEAN will support cities in their transition towards regenerative soil systems by promoting innovations for soil improvement from bio-waste with a value-based approach. The project will implement 3 Living Labs, as pilot city-regions, to follow a multi-actor and participative approach. In each LL, after mapping local contexts in terms of material and monetary flows, a tailored evaluation framework to demonstrate the safety, environmental and socio-economic performance of soil improvers will be co-designed and implemented, through field testing on experimental sites, feasibility studies and choice experiments. The data obtained will feed into a pilot scoring system, that will be co-developed and validated during the project, to help cities selecting the most effective solutions adapted to the geo-spatial context, i.e. inner city, urban-rural fringe and the wider market. The highest scored solutions will be selected for the development of innovative and tailored business models. The latter will match to stakeholders’ willingness-to-adopt (circular) implementation packages, e.g. collection schemes, cooperation networks, infrastructures and fee structures. The pre-market processes will be monitored through Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA). Finally, based on all previous results, local, national and EU policy roadmaps will be drafted, including waste charging policies and citizen awareness campaigns in the city-region, that will be piloted in LLs. All this will feed into a PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) approach, enabling cities to create a continuous value-based improvement loop towards regenerative soil systems. BIN2BEAN will support local waste management with the creation of 40 start-ups specialising in the soil improvers value chains. This will help to reach Europe's 2035 objectives of reducing landfill to 10% of total waste while reinjecting nearly 135,000 tonnes of nitrogen and 45,000 tonnes of phosphorus into soils in an environmental, human and sustainable way.

ZEBAI is an ambitious integrative project in which a broad range of interdisciplinary teams collaborate to develop a new methodology that aims to change the way that Zero-emission buildings are designed, by integrating all interdependent analysis and partial alternative decision-making processes under a holistic approach that allows the evaluation of a design simultaneously taking into account: energy performance, environmental impact, indoor environmental quality, and cost-effectiveness. For this purpose, we will require to develop a database of well-characterised materials and make an estimation of discrepancies between simulated and actual building performance. The methodology that will be used is artificial intelligence techniques to optimise the selection of materials and systems in different aspects of the building design. The AI-assisted methodology aims to make the design process more efficient and user-friendly while incorporating all environmental quality and cost-effectiveness objectives. This approach will enable the optimisation of new architectural designs towards scalable Zero Energy Building (ZEB) design in different climates, usages, and building patterns, with the ultimate goal of achieving a zero-emission building stock by 2050. During the project, we will test ZEBAI methodology with four representative demonstrators (located in Ukraine, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands). ZEBAI relies on previously funded European research projects and aligns with several national initiatives in which the partners collaborate.

Ai-aided deCision tool for seamless mUltiModal nEtwork and traffic managemeNt (ACUMEN) proposes a generic, privacy-preserving, data-driven modular digital paradigm for advanced network management, which aims at enabling efficient and reliable door-to-door journeys for people and goods, increased safety and resilience at the network level, and to make a critical contribution to achieving the transport goals set forth in the green deal. The main concept developed in ACUMEN is a modular, multi-layered Digital Twin (DT), a high-fidelity representation of integrated and interacting real complex systems, ultimately forming a digitised version of seamless and sustainable, connected urban mobility. This is complemented by plug-in modules, or digital tools, which represent the outcomes of the models (physics-based or data-driven based), data (including that generated via AI/ML approaches using said models), and simulation tools at the disposal of a city/road authority/mobility service provider. AI-powered digital tools supporting mobility management and decision-making, exploiting the modular DT architecture, will be developed by leading academic and research partners, in close cooperation with global industry partners and stakeholders. The DT platform will be demonstrated and validated through a set of comprehensive and carefully selected use cases, co-created with stakeholders, involving different scales and urban forms, to challenge the capabilities of ACUMEN with a diverse range of transport management problems and applications. The ACUMEN consortium (6 Universities - one is the Coordinator, 6 Industrial partners, 2 RTOs , 3 stakeholders) has been formed to address a combination of technical and implementation challenges to develop and successfully launch ACUMEN as a solution for policy makers and stakeholders in transport.

The built environment is ill-prepared for more frequent and increasingly intense climate-related extreme events. These cause severe socio-economic losses and adversely affects public health. Recent scientific and technological advances in the construction industry provide timely solutions for improving the resilience of buildings for specific hazards, but these are often not cost effective or eco-friendly. There is a lack of frameworks for assessing the climate resilience, making it challenging to develop optimal solutions for multi-hazard scenarios. MULTICARE will address this challenge by developing innovative multi-criteria decision-support frameworks and providing plug & play low-carbon resilient technologies for improving the multi-hazard resilience of our built environment in a cost-effective, reliable and sustainable manner. A suite of multi-disciplinary digital services and tools will be developed for multi-hazard resilience assessment, design, operation and management across multiple scales (material, component, building, neighbourhood/district). This will enable stakeholders to make more informed decisions to select materials/solutions and build resilient supply chains, even in case of cultural heritage buildings. We will demonstrate our results in large-scale pilots (3 buildings, 4 neighbourhoods/cities) in different countries with diverse conditions. A user-centred, inclusive and participatory approach will be consistently implemented at all stages of the project for citizens engagement and for extending the durability of MULTICARE impact. To achieve the project goals, MULTICARE combines 21 partners covering the whole technical value chain required for solutions in resilient and sustainable buildings. The Consortium includes experience in social sciences, user engagement and training. The Consortium will support clustering activities with other projects aimed at sharing knowledge, experience, and raising public awareness of climate resilience.

The transport sector is expected to alter shape in the coming decades. This transition is driven by user-centred mobility services, integrated and intelligent transport networks, pricing and payments, automation, safety and security, as well as public and private innovation. Next to Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, these developments provide major opportunities, but also increase system complexity. The overarching aim of DIT4TraM is to develop, implement and test a generic distributed control paradigm, applicable at the level of traffic operations, mobility management, demand-supply synchronisation and shared mobility, including advanced monitoring, estimation and (machine learning) forecasting technology, and associated algorithms for a variety of novel multi-modal management and mobility concepts operating at all urban scales. A holistic approach to decentralisation, distribution and mechanism design for monitoring and control is proposed aiming to achieve social optimality, yet with only necessary information exchanges, which is further translated into four key application fields corresponding to four interlaced urban scales carefully selected to ensure that all relevant challenges are tackled. Pilots in several cities across Europe are organised to test DIT4TraM concepts and assess market potential and design business models. Our vision is to support the transition to seamless and sustainable connected and autonomous mobility by disentangling the system components to the highest extent possible, yet ensuring sufficient cooperation and emergent coordination by smart system design, leading to liveability, safety, resilience, efficiency, as well as privacy, participation, fairness and sustainability on a city scale. The DIT4TraM partnership (4 Universities, 5 Industrial partners, 2 RTOs, 3 stakeholders), has been formed to address the combination of technical, organisational, and implementation challenges to develop and successfully test the proposed solution.