This proposal describes a series of activities that will support the successful delivery of the TRA conference in Dublin in 2024. A consortium has been assembled that addresses all the key requirements of the call: • They represent the key transport modes with at least 2 partners active in road, rail, waterborne, aviation and cross-modal. • The partners are all active in European research and have the reach to promote the conference across Europe. • The partners have a long history of delivering high quality researcher competitions where Europe’s research leaders are recognised. The partners will work with key stakeholders to ensure the conference themes support European policies. The proposal also has the full support of the Irish Minister for Transport and this will ensure the full support of relevant Irish agencies. The partners will work together to deliver a conference that builds on the success of previous TRA conferences and provide a forum that will allow the key actors in the transport sector come together to develop solutions for society’s needs.

Like energy and automotive before it, UK freight transport is now on the cusp of a socio-technical transition away from fossil fuel dependency. This transition will require major investment to fleet and infrastructure, cause disruption to assets and business models, and will trigger significant reconfiguration. Whilst the scaling up of fossil phase-out is most likely to occur from the 2030s onwards, the next 10 years of investments are critical to enabling the transition, and to mitigating transition risks to the "hard to abate" freight sectors, and by association UK trade. Our concept to address this challenge is for a Network of broad but interconnected academic excellence integrated with key and leading stakeholders in freight decarbonisation, that collaboratively develops and applies knowledge and understanding of rapid freight decarbonisation. We will use this Network to collect and distil current knowledge, as well as to identify and de-risk the key remaining research challenges that can unleash significant freight-decarbonisation targeted investment and guide enabling policy. This Network connects five freight transport investments made by the EPSRC with a track record of a whole systems approach to decarbonisation of UK freight flows (international and national), and of closely integrating and embedding research with industry and policy makers alike. The Network's efforts will be guided by a number of features of UK freight transport including: (i) significant fixed infrastructure with long timescales for investment (ii) lack of consensus on the specific technological solutions for each mode (iii) a complex combination of national and international transport systems (iv) besides the road and rail network, a limited scope for public sector investment (v) Complex governance involving a mix of UK, EU and international (UN) regulation. The Network will align and integrate directly with UK government and existing initiatives including (i) Industrial strategy (ii) Clean Growth Strategy (iii) Road to zero (iv) Clean Maritime Council (v) UN agency fora (vi) World Bank's Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (vii) ongoing work on aligning investment to decarbonisation with: European Investment Bank, UK private sector institutions, IFC and IMF, and leading investment NGOs: 2 degrees investing, World Economic Forum, Global Maritime Forum, Global Shippers Forum, UK FTA. To achieve this Network's objective of unleashing significant investment for freight decarbonisation, it is organised into five multi-modal and cross-cutting thematic areas and executed through a three-step approach: Theme 1: Role of data and models for unlocking implementation decision making Theme 2: Managing macroeconomic, policy and technology uncertainty, whilst mitigating climate risk in investment decisions Theme 3: Fuel and propulsion technology pathways Theme 4: Aligning drivers for decarbonisation investment/policy with local (inc. air pollution), UK, EU and Global climate policy and integrating into private sector decision making Theme 5. Coupling the evolution of logistics with decarbonizing freight Step 1: Refinement of current knowledge and perspectives into a focused set of research questions covering each of the five themes Step 2: Commissioning of a series (~13) small projects which can develop further understanding of these questions and the methods suitable for addressing them Step 3: Distillation of the Network's knowledge, in combination with the outputs of the small projects, to produce a strategy to drive freight decarbonisation investment, and an agenda and plan describing a series of further collaboration and funding activity that can sustain the Network

The main objective of the prodPhD project is to implement innovative social network-based methodologies for teaching and learning entrepreneurship in PhD programmes. The multidisciplinary teaching and learning methodologies to be developed will allow introducing entrepreneurship education in any PhD programme of a higher education institution, providing students with the knowledge, skills and motivation to engage in entrepreneurial activities. The methodology will be conceived to develop experiential knowledge, involving academics, entrepreneurship experts and mentors in its development and implementation. Besides, the exchange of experience, competences and approaches facilitated by social networking will allow crowdsourcing new ideas, improving training methodologies and stimulating entrepreneurial skills of academics. In particular, prodPhD will deliver and demonstrate, through different pilot actions, a social network-based training methodology, which will include the necessary teaching guidelines and specific “learning by doing” materials for entrepreneurship training, as well as the required prodPhD Online Training Environment, integrating customized collaborative work and social network solutions. The outcome of the prodPhD project will be openly offered to the higher education community. The project is built on the collaboration with four running ERASMUS+ and MSCA-ITN projects, involving 20 higher education institutions from nine different EU countries, and more than twenty-five companies and research centres. Besides, four running H2020 running projects and sixteen other European associations and organizations will also collaborate with the project by becoming members of the Expert Advisory Board of prodPhD. This collaboration will be fundamental for the specific requirements analysis and for the development and assessment of the demonstration actions to which all the collaborating institutions will be invited to participate.

DT4GS is aimed at delivering an “Open Digital Twin Framework” for both shipping companies and the broader waterborne industry actors to tap into new opportunities made available through the use of Digital Twins(DTs). The project will enable shipping stakeholders to embrace the full spectrum of DT innovations to support smart green shipping in the upgrade of existing ships and new vessels. DT4GS will cover the full ship lifecycle by embracing federation of DT applications as well as utilising DTLF policies and related shared-dataspace developments for the sector. DT4GS applications will focus on shipping companies but will also provide decarbonisation decision-support system for shipyards, equipment manufacturers, port authorities and operators, river commissions, classification societies, energy companies and transport/corridor infrastructure companies. DT4GS’s objectives are to: 1. Support shipping companies in achieving up to 20% reduction in CO2e with a 2026 horizon, by developing and deploying real-time configurable DTs for ship and fleet operational performance optimisation in 4 Living Labs involving shipping companies, with different vessel types, and establishing fully validated industry services for Green Shipping Operational Optimisation DTs expected to be adopted by 1000+ ships by 2030. 2. Establish a comprehensive zero-emission shipping methodology and support Virtual Testbed and Decision Support Systems that address both new builds and retrofits comprising: a. A DT4GS (Green Shipping) Dataspace for the broader shipping sector contributing to GAIA-X by establishing a core European industry resource that accelerates the green and digital transition of waterborne shipping and transport value chains. b. Simulation based solutions to retrofit ships, targeting 55% reduced CO2e reduction by 2030. c. A smart green “new-build” reference design per vessel type. d. Virtual Testbed services for reducing the cost of physical testing of GS solutions by 20%.