The volume of the commercial freight sector is expected to increase towards 2050, especially in the medium to heavy truck modes (N2 and N3 type). However, in parallel to that, the recent European climate goals bring challenges for the transport sector. Given the fact that the typical vehicle development cycles can be of 5-7 years, an immediate collective and collaborative action from the research organizations, business strategists, technology companies and OEMs is necessary. The result of this would be to attain high-TRL concepts that are ready to roll out in the European and global market, where there is more room for a gradual adoption at the consumer side. In any case, given the fact that there are substantial technological and business steps are being taken in the zero-emission transport field, the next 30 years towards 2050 potentially requires more dramatic changes than the last 30 years (i.e., since 1990). NextETRUCK aims to address different optimization challenges regarding tomorrow’s urban and suburban logistics for medium duty vehicles into systems-approach that is reliable, strongly integrated, affordable, and flexible enough to re-applied to different applications via dedicated tools/methods. The overarching objective of the NextETRUCK project is to play a pioneering role in the decarbonization of the vehicle fleets, via demonstrating next generation e-mobility concepts consisting of holistic, innovative, affordable, competitive and synergetic zero emission vehicles and ecosystems for tomorrow’s medium freight haulage, while aiming significant leap of knowledge at component, vehicle, fleet, infrastructure and ecosystem levels, via innovations at e-powertrain components and architectures, smart charging infrastructure and management, improved thermal design of the cabin, fleet management systems with IoT and digital tools.

Electromobility is a major factor towards transport decarbonisation. However a number of challenges (limited charging options, lack of interoperability, absence of a unified identification/payment process, energy grid overload, expensive charging tariffs) limit the potential for interoperable and seamless electromobility services to a wider of actors and geographic area, hindering electromobility adoption. These challenges stem from lack of standardisation in electromobility data and services. NeMo addresses all issues through a pan-European eRoaming Hyper-Network that allows seamless and interoperable use of electromobility services throughout Europe. In addition it provides an Open Cloud Marketplace, where third parties can provide services (B2B2C) aiming to increase EV attractiveness. The NeMo Hyper-Network is a distributed environment with open architecture based on standardised interfaces, in which all electromobility actors, physical (i.e. CPs, grids, EVs) or digital (i.e. CPOs, DSOs, etc.), can connect and interact seamlessly, exchange data and provide more elaborate electromobility ICT services in a fully integrated and interoperable way both B2B and B2C. The connection will be based on dynamic translation of data and services interfaces according to needs of the specific scenarios and involved stakeholders. NeMo is not just another proprietary platform for electromobility but a full open eco-system allowing continuous and uninterrupted provision of data and services. NeMo will raise awareness, liaise with standardisation bodies and contribute to the evolution of protocols and standards by developing public Common Information Models which incorporate all existing electromobility related standards and constantly update them to reflect standards evolution. NeMo will also propose sustainable business models for all electromobility actors opening new opportunities for SMEs and EU Industry.

The C-MobILE (Accelerating C-ITS Mobility Innovation and depLoyment in Europe) vision is a fully safe & efficient road transport without casualties and serious injuries on European roads, in particular in complex urban areas and for Vulnerable Road Users. We envision a congestion-free, sustainable and economically viable mobility, minimizing the environmental impact of road transport. C-MobILE will set the basis for large scale deployment in Europe, elevating research pilot sites to deployment locations of sustainable services that are supported by local authorities, using a common approach that ensures interoperability and seamless availability of services towards acceptable end user cost and positive business case for parties in the supply chain. The C-MobILE project will produce 7 key results: - C-ITS framework defined in partnerships with major stakeholders for proposing key deployment enabling solutions on existing pilot sites, including business cases - Strategic Research Agenda defined for key researching and innovation areas that promote sustainable C-ITS deployments and will lead towards automated transport in Europe - Assessment including CBA of the cumulative real-life benefits of clustering C-ITS applications and integrating multiple transport modes in the C-ITS ecosystem - Open secure large-scale C-ITS deployment of new and existing applications demonstrated in complex urban environments interoperable across countries involving large groups of end users - Provide an open platform towards C-ITS sources to support deployment of service concepts on commodity devices, validated by developer communities - Validated operational procedures for large-scale deployment of sustainable C-ITS services in Europe - Released testing methodologies to evaluate the proven impact of C-ITS architectures and services

The assurance of security, privacy, reliability and safety features is key-point to unlock the enormous potential that the connected vehicles systems paradigm i.e., the dynamic Cyberphysical system of highly-equipped infrastructure-connected vehicles with numerous third-party components, can offer towards safer transportation. The emerging systems expose a variety of wireless-communication and hardware interfaces which result in a large attack surface; thus, attempts to assess the degree of confidence that security needs are satisfied come with prohibited cost for automotive stakeholders and OEMs. SAFERtec project will leverage a highly-skilled consortium to first model the varying exposure of a prototype connected vehicle system to numerous threats appearing under two generic instances of the increasingly pervasive V2I setting. One relates to road-side unit communication while the other involves the interaction with cloud application and passengers' smart devices. Then, adopting a systematic vertical approach SAFERtec will obtain an in-depth look of the possible vulnerabilities performing penetration-testing on individual hardware components and upper-layer V2I applications. Considering the available security mechanisms a third party provider already applies to each module, SAFERtec will determine a corresponding protection profile as a summary of the identified risks. An innovative framework appropriately designed for unified and thus, cost-effective use across all modules will employ statistical tools and security metrics to quantify the involved security assurance levels and also feed the incomplete automotive standards. Research on dependability methods will then allow the framework's transition from individual modules to the connected vehicle system. All above results will be incorporated and made available through an open-access toolkit that will pave the way towards the cost-effective identification of security assurance levels for connected vehicle systems.

Highly automated vehicles and cooperative ITS technology will get more and more present in the near future. By combining both, guidance of (groups of) such vehicles can considerably improve especially in urban areas. For management of automated vehicles at signalized intersection and corridors, the MAVEN (Managing Automated Vehicles Enhances Network) project will develop infrastructure-assisted platoon organization and negotiation algorithms. These extend and connect vehicle systems for trajectory and maneuver planning and infrastructure systems for adaptive traffic light optimization. Traffic lights adapting their signal timing to facilitate the movement of organized platoons and reversely will yield substantial better utilization of infrastructure capacity, reduction of vehicle delay and reduction of emission. The MAVEN project will build a system prototype for both field tests and extensive modeling for impact assessment, contribute to the development of enabling technologies such as communication standards and high-precision maps, and develop ADAS techniques for inclusion of vulnerable road users. Additionally, MAVEN will include a user assessment and the development of a roadmap for the introduction of vehicle-road automation to support road authorities in understanding changes in their role and the tasks of traffic management systems. Finally, MAVEN will white paper on ‘management of automated vehicles in a smart city environment’ will be written to position the MAVEN results in the broader perspective of passenger transport in smart / future cities and to embed them with smart city principles and technologies as well as service delivery.