ESRIUM is a multi-national project with the common goal to set up a service to foster greener and smarter road usage, road maintenance, and to increase road safety. The key innovation will be formed by a homogeneous, accurate and recent digital map of road surface damage and road wear. ESRIUM’s core proposition is a data platform, which hosts highly detailed EGNSS-referenced map data of road damage and associated safety risks at centimeter-level resolution. Further addressed as “road wear map”, it will contain unique information, which is of value to multiple stakeholders: road operators will be able to lower the road maintenance effort by optimal planning. Further, road operators will be able to lower road wear and increase traffic safety especially for heavy vehicles. Considering the market introduction of partly automated truck fleets, the precise track of these vehicles can be adjusted by communicating precise routing recommendations in- and cross-lane. Truck fleet operators following these recommendations can receive tolling benefits, and increase the general safety for their vehicle fleet. Especially with the increasing levels of autonomy, systems will utilize infrastructure support to handle the requirements of the automated driving task and additional external requests. In ESRIUM, these opportunities are addressed by utilizing C-ITS infrastructure and EGNSS based localization in planning the trajectories of such automated vehicles. Key to the ESRIUM innovation is a precision localization service, which provides reliable locatization information of road damages and of the vehicles using the roads. Considering a European-level business-case, only Galileo may provide such a service in homogeneous quality, even at very remote locations on the European continent.

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 tomorrows 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 tomorrows 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.

FAME will develop and validate common methodologies and tools to facilitate the sharing of best practices and lessons learned to support the collaboration within the community of CCAM stakeholders across the complex cross-sectorial value chain needed for the organisation and evaluation of large-scale demonstration and future scale-up to the impacts of complete CCAM solutions. The mission of FAME supports the commitment of the European Commission and the CCAM Partnership to provide a long-term coordination framework for R&I and large-scale testing and evaluation activities in Europe. The establishment of a stakeholder-validated European framework for testing on public roads, including a CCAM test data space (TDS), a common evaluation methodology (CEM), and of means for exchange of knowledge on CCAM activities will improve cooperation, consensus building and data sharing. It will enable comparability and complementarity of the results of all testing and large-scale demonstration activities in Europe. FAME builds on a strong legacy of EU-funded Coordination and Support Actions which have developed harmonised methodologies and federated large networks of stakeholders to drive consensus building on challenges, needs and requirements for CCAM and Field Operational Tests. FAME involves 23 partners and over 2000 subscribers of the current Joint CAD network which has collaborated with the European Partnership on CCAM Partnership since its inception. The development of the European Framework for testing on public roads is at the core of FAME. The overall approach is built around three main building blocks and aims to engage with and enable (in terms of capacity building) stakeholders from the CCAM area, as well as capitalise knowledge about CCAM through an integrated approach including stakeholder engagement (WP3), research and innovation on the evaluation methodology and testing framework (WP 4 and 5) and communication and knowledge sharing (WPs 1 and 2) to maximise impact.

SMARTY invokes a cloud-edge continuum, made from heterogeneous systems, that protects data-in-transit and data-in-process in order to offer a trustful fabric to run AI processes. The securitization occurs by employing novel accelerators for quantum resilient communications, confidential computing, software defined perimeters and swarm formation, offering multiple layers of security. Semantic programmability and graph-management open the door to drag-and-drop approaches in deploying services in a fast and reliable manner. SMARTY is proposed within the context of different key sectors in Europe : automotive, fintech, telco and industrial settings; the technology proposed in SMARTY will be matured within the lifetime of the project and tested through five use cases. SMARTY is supported by large European industry players and well as by 13 SMEs which will seek a visible platform to develop their products and gain visibility towards high-growth. SMARTY’s major suppliers and OEMs and reputable academic partners provide a great opportunity for these 13 SMEs to mature their technologies in a challenging but safe environment. The results of SMARTY are applicable to different vertical sectors and can be transported to different use cases. Strong synergies with existing efforts in the area of edge computing, European processors and trustworthy AI are envisioned and planned within SMARTY.

Hi-Drive addresses a number of key challenges which are currently hindering the progress of developments in vehicle automation. The key aim of the project is to focus on testing and demonstrating automated driving, by improving intelligent vehicle technologies, to cover a large set of traffic environments, not currently achievable. Hi-Drive enables testing of a variety of functionalities, from motorway chauffeur to urban chauffeur, explored in diverse scenarios with heterogeneous driving cultures across Europe. In particular, the Hi-Drive trials will consider European TEN-T corridors and urban nodes in large and medium cities, with a specific attention to demanding, error-prone, conditions. The project’s ambition is to considerably extend the operational design domain (ODD) from the present situation, which frequently demands interventions from the human driver. Therefore, the project concept builds on reaching a widespread and continuous ODD, where automation can operate for longer periods and interoperability is assured across borders and brands. The project also investigates what factors influence user behavior and acceptance, as well as understanding the needs of other road users interacting with these vehicles. The removal of fragmentation in the ODD is expected to give rise to a gradual transition from a conditional operation towards higher levels of automated driving. With these aims, Hi-Drive associates a consortium of 41 European partners with a wide range of interests and capabilities covering the main impact areas which affect users, and the transport system, and enhance societal benefits. The project intends to contribute towards market deployment of automated systems by 2030. All this cannot be achieved by testing only. Accordingly, the work includes outreach activities on business innovation and standardization, plus extended networking with the interested stakeholders, coordinating parallel activities in Europe and overseas.