Europe is facing unprecedented challenges, such as the health, migration, economic, climate, energy, and political crises, leading to a sharp increase in emergency public spending and relaxation of due diligence checks. This has resulted in a rise in corruption and fraudulent activities, which have significant negative impacts on the European economy, society, environment, and democracy. Despite emerging technology’s potential to become a powerful tool in the fight against corruption and fraud, the public sector has been slow to adopt digitalization, resulting in data NOT being shared, harmonized, or properly analysed, making evidence-based decision-making almost impossible. Governments are slowly adopting new approaches to ensure a more data-driven, transparent, and accountable public governance, but several fundamental data-related issues remain unresolved. With a team of 9 excellent research institutions and universities, 12 technology, business, and standards, developing companies, 7 public end users, and 3 domain-relevant, industry-exposed NGOs, CEDAR will: (1) Identify, collect, fuse, harmonise, and protect complex data sources to generate and share 10+ high-quality, high-value datasets relevant for a more transparent and accountable public governance in Europe. (2) Develop interoperable and secure connectors and APIs to utilise and enrich 6+ Common European Data Spaces. (3) Develop innovative and scalable technologies for effective big data management and Machine Learning (ML) operations. (4) Deliver robust big data analytics and ML to facilitate human-centric and evidence-based decision-making in public administration. (4) Validate the new datasets and technologies (TRL5) in the context of fighting corruption, thus aligning with the EU strategic priorities: digitalisation, economy, democracy. (5) Actively promote results across Europe to ensure their adoption and longevity, and to generate positive, direct, tangible, and immediate impacts.

Urban areas host 70% of the EU population, and it is estimated that this will increase up to 84% by 2050, exacerbating the EU cities’ current daunting problems such as air quality and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In 2019, the transport sector was accountable for 27% of total EU GHG emissions, of which road transport accounted for approximately 72%. Many cities are looking to promote public and nonmotorised forms of transport to provide access to safe, affordable, accessible, and sustainable transport systems for all citizens. Many cities in Europe and worldwide are witnessing an increasing interest in shared and multi-modal mobility services using modes such as carsharing, bikes, ride-hailing, e-scooters facilitated by the emergence of intermediary mobility-on-demand platforms. Mobility services accessible ‘on demand’ can be achieved by an integrated Multimodal Intelligent Transport System (M-ITS) incorporating both motorised and non-motorised transport as well as private and public systems through the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) Sustainable mobility alternatives such as a fully integrated and seamless multimodal mobility system that can be made widely available with the communication and computation advancements. RE-ROUTE an integRated intElligent multi-modal tRanspOrt infrastrUcTurE: distributed localised decision-making at the network edge forms an international, interdisciplinary, and inter-sectoral network of institutions with complementary skills, working on a joint research and knowledge transfer programme to improve the multi-modal Mobility-as-a- Service transport integration through localised Edge-based real-time data sharing, decentralised decision making, and localised network that places the processing at the proximity of data, contribute to evidence-based policy and physical infrastructure development and developing a unique skill set for the participating partners and improving their career prospects in the emerging ITS job market.

Today public authorities need to provide better services with fewer resources. Citizens require accessible, user-friendly, personalised, and integrated public services that match their needs and circumstances. At the same time, trust in the public sector deteriorates. We argue the solution rests in enhancing existing relevant EU work (on policies, models, frameworks, roadmaps etc) by adopting best research and practice (e.g. in public service co-creation) and by exploiting relevant technologies particularly mobile apps, virtual assistants (chatbots), knowledge graphs, and linked data. We acknowledge that for many years, the EU is providing useful practical advice including frameworks (e.g. EIF), models (e.g. CPSV), architectures (e.g. EIRA), roadmaps, etc. These however are not directly applicable anymore as they do not incorporate the latest research and practice, e.g. in public service co-creation. Similarly, research is not related to EU work and practice is not related to research. The vision of the inGov project is to provide innovative ICT-supported governance models as well as mobile apps including chatbots, which will enable stakeholders' collaboration in co-producing inclusive and accessible Integrated Public Services (IPS) thus increasing trust and satisfaction. For that purpose, multidisciplinary scientific methods will be used including design science, multiple case study and variants of the technology acceptance model. The project results will be piloted in Malta to modernise the digital family household public service (affecting 200,000 households), in Austria to deploy IPS for collecting tourism tax (affecting 3,200 accommodation providers), in Greece to digitise the disabled card renewal service (benefiting 11,500 disabled, low-income citizens) and in Croatia to create AI-driven virtual assistants and services (affecting 32,000 citizens). We aim to feed our results back to EU policies hence achieving alignment between policies, research and practice.