In the last decades terrorist attacks on public rail transport systems such as underground systems, suburban traffic and express trains including their infrastructure have significantly increased. Because of their strategic European dimension, their advanced technology and their economic consequences, the Franco-German high speed rail systems as flag ships ( and national symbols) of the rail-based European transport represent attractive targets of potential terrorists . Compared to high safety standards of the high speed rail systems the security standards against terrorism needs to be improved . In particular there is no preventive security available to maintain the paradigm of an “open system” for a mass transport system, which is assumed by operational experts to collapse in case of implementation of airport-like security. Yet in recent years research in sensor technology, to detect and identify improvised explosive devices (“IED´s”) and other means in terrorist hands from a stand-off position made significant progress and led to a first proof of concept for a remote network of sensors /detectors. A security system which includes such a remote sensor network as a core –element would allow to detect a terrorist attack on their way to their point of impact – without to implement individual security control of all passengers, thus maintaining the character of an “open” operational high-speed system. A group of enterprises, a SME, several university and research institutes, the two high speed rail operators and respective police directories on both French and German side agreed to develop a proposal to investigate the impact of novel security systems mentioned above, against terrorist attacks on the Franco-German high speed railway systems. The project RE(H)STRAIN aims at the investigation of preventive security and its impact on the resilience of the Franco-German high speed rail network in case of terrorist attacks.

Current approaches in official statistics, urban planning and transportation for measuring the presence of population at a given place in time, their mobility and land use are traditionally based on single-source data, such as census, surveys, traffic counts, etc., possibly integrated with geospatial information (maps, satellite imagery, space occupancy, etc.). These sources give the illusion of static spatial structures as they only provide punctual description of the phenomenon they measure. Digital data open up fundamental perspectives for the dynamic analysis of territories, at finer levels of geographical and temporal accuracy, and may provide actors with the potential to manage their resources more efficiently, which is a requirement for a sustainable development of the territories. The extracted information can thus enrich mobility and presence models, by labelling travellers’ origins and destinations with frequency and time information, as well as by assigning one or multiple goals to the associated movements. By exploiting such massive data, breakthroughs are expected in terms of a more flexible, adapted and higher-quality offer of services and infrastructures in the field of tourism, emergency and health-risk management, water supply, waste collection and treatment, mobility services and transportation. However, single-source data are partial and biased, and their ability to grasp complex urban phenomena is therefore reduced. The joint usage of multiple sources of digital (e.g., mobile phone, ticketing) and traditional data (e.g., census data, maps, etc.) will make it possible to fully take advantage of the strengths of each different type of source and overcome their inner individual limitations and biases. MobiTIC has its foundation in the desire for close collaboration among the actors in order to define, develop and implement a finer-grained methodology to collect and exploit mobile phone network signalling data joined with other digital and traditional data sources (smart card, surveys, GPS data, etc.). MobiTIC’s methodology shall produce novel models, analyses and indicators of presence and mobility that are relevant, reliable, compliant with privacy rules, representative and frequently updated. These indicators shall be produced at the finest spatial and temporal resolutions in order to support the decisions of local actors towards the sustainable development of territories and to open new research opportunities on both spatial and social dynamics. MobiTIC builds on the 2019 strategic priorities of the French State, which are at the interface between human and social sciences and artificial intelligence. As a first output, MobiTIC aims to produce dynamic population maps at several spatial scales over the territory. This mapping of population presence and mobility will be used to characterize geographical areas, to differentiate the uses of the space by groups, to measure the effects of social and territorial inequalities, thus allowing to zoom on specific groups/areas of interest in public action (priority neighbourhoods of the city, peri-urban areas, city centers, peripheral polarities). The functional organization of the urban systems described via this new kind of information will lead to new models and will be compared to existing zoning systems in order to make them evolve. As a second output, MobiTIC aims to provide mobility indicators at higher frequency than surveys to permit a continuous follow-up of the changes in people mobility and to drive sustainable policies from public actors, which aim to influence them. The proposed spatio-temporal indicators will be used to measure the impact of events on mobility practices and will lead to the development of a decision-support tool for public policy evaluation (based on multi-agent systems) allowing for ex-ante simulation-based evaluations. The city of Rennes will be the area of interest for the studies on mobility proposed in the project.

Seismic imaging is an effective tool to investigate the earth interior for academic and industrial purposes, from scales of a few meters to the global Earth. Recently, seismic imaging techniques based on the Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) of active (explosion or airgun) or passive (earthquakes) sources seismic records have made important progress. It has now reached the point where FWI is a credible technique for realistic 3-D imaging of geological structures and intensive researches on this subject are carried out by both academic institutions and the oil industry. Nevertheless, for many applications, these techniques remain a huge challenge from both technical and theoretical point of view. So far, FWI are built as a linearized and regularized least squares optimization problem and the challenges linked to local minima of the misfit function, non-uniqueness of the solution, interpretation and uncertainties of the obtained images, and the huge computational cost strongly limit the application range of such methods. The main objective of the HIWAI project is to widely extend the range of applications of FWI methods to important domains of societal and scientific interest by developing an alternative and innovative approach based on two new tools recently developed by our teams: the non-periodic homogenization and Bayesian downscaling techniques. A 2-steps inversion will be developed, leading to a method close to a fully probabilistic approach of the inverse problem, a solution commonly considered as out of reach for current computers when based on full waveform forward problem. If successful, this will be a significant breakthrough. Among the possible applications where the proposed method will bring a significant improvement, highly contrasted media are of particular interest. Such media, which can often overturn current FWI techniques, can be commonly found, at the civil engineer scale, in natural hazard key issues such as foundation survey, cavities and potential collapse detections, and, at the oil exploration scale, characterization of complex reservoirs. The obtained models will also be particularly well suited for applications where good quality data prediction is necessary (e.g. nuclear monitoring, earthquake nucleation, seismic risk assessment). Important improvements are also expected in applications where the interpretation of seismic images and quantitative answers to precise questions are required (e.g. what is probability to find a high water content in a given area, or is the observed anisotropy intrinsic or only apparent? How connected is the fault network of a given oil reservoir?). Even if the proposed developments can be applied to any scale, during the project the method will be developed and tested for local to regional scale applications. The project is organized in 4 tasks: 1) 2-D FWI in the homogenized space (step 1 inversion), 2) 2-D downscaling inversion (step 2 inversion), 3) reduced scale analogue data generation for testing the inversion schemes, 4) 3-D developments. Through a collaborative project (PRC instrument), all the necessary skills will be gathered involving 5 partners: homogenization and inversion (LPGNantes), seismic inversion and oil prospection scale imaging (SEISCOPE2, Grenoble), experimental seismic modeling at reduced scale and seismic imaging of the near surface (IFSTTAR, Bouguenais), Bayesian inversion (ENS Lyon) and Geomodeling (RING, Nancy). The project tackles a novel fundamental theoretical approach for which the early developments and tests will be driven by the needs at different scales. It will provide a long term research subject which will naturally lead to further applied projects, implying industrial partners, for tackling societal and academic problematics at various scales.

In the past recent years, tensions have appeared on the asphalt supply for road construction, since cracking of heavy petroleum distillation residues to produce gasoline has become economically competitive due to the high level of the crude oil market. Moreover, the processing conditions of some oxidized bitumen for waterproofing have been recently classified as potentially carcinogen. As a consequence, it is of high importance for the future that France, which hosts most of the leading companies in the road construction area, anticipates the development of novel technologies to produce alternative binders to petroleum-based bitumen. In this context, the main objective of Algoroute is to identify, in a medium- to long-term perspective, some processes to valorize biomass residues (from agriculture, food industry…) to anticipate the future tensions on the petroleum market. In this study, microalgae residues will be used as a model system. Indeed, - this biomass feedstock has now been investigated for decades, due to significant benefits over other biomass sources (i.e. cellulosic), including low competition for arable land, high per hectare biomass yields, and large harvesting turnovers. Numerous research studies are conducting to produce microalgae biomass for energy and feeding applications and the development of this technology is very likely to result in the production of significant amounts of waste (i.e. the non-valorized solid residues of microalgae). - the wide variety of microalgae will allow to screen an important chemical diversity. These residues, generated after a first valorization, will be easily accessible because one of the partner is a company specialized in the production and valorization of microalgae. In that context, hydrothermal liquefaction has been identified as a relevant process to transform biomass residues into bio-sourced road binders with controlled thermochemical and physicochemical properties. The work packages present in the Algoroute proposal will address the main scientific and technical challenges, to make then possible the development of a viable large scale industrial process. This includes (1) a detailed understanding of physical and chemical phenomena taking place during the hydrothermal liquefaction process, and their influence on the rheological behavior of the resulting hydrophobic material, as a function of the nature of the initial biomass residues (2) the multi-criteria optimization of the experimental conditions for the production of bio-bitumen suitable for paving. In summary, the Algoroute proposal is very innovating since biomass residues are proposed to produce alternative binders, for the first time worldwide. The objective is to valorize a microalgae by-product, as a model system, by developing the understanding and control of the hydrothermal liquefaction process which is considered as a key enabling technology for this sector. Based on the results of the project other categories of biomass residues might be considered.

The action of research focus on the untreated fine behavior of the soil constructions, and the the hydromechanical not saturated coupling. This domain of behavior is not taken into account in the design of such constructions, it is not teached in schools and no reference guide dealing with this problem exists. The most used professionnal guide GTR indicates the conditions of use of materials (traficability and compaction). Nevertheless, the problems of stability of the constructions in fine soils, their breath (frost / unfrost, moistening, infiltration / evaporation, capillary) and deformations associated during the construction or after the reception of the construction are not approached. The analysis of the pathologies on the existing soils constructions shows that the majority of the disorders are connected to unknown hydric conditions into fine soil constructions.. The TerreDurable project provides a guide needed by profession and gives a methodology of design which is founded on on scientific data and on experience of the practitioners. The objective of this project is to propose a methodology of study for the new soil constructions but also for the repair of the existing constructions which present disorders connected to the unsaturation phenomena. The project should be labelled by the center of excellence INDURA