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8th October 2018

New €10.2M Project on the Future of Automated Driving

Urban Foresight is delighted to announce its participation in the eagerly awaited ICT4CART project, officially launched in Athens, Greece in September 2018.

ICT4CART, is an EU-funded H2020 innovation action and consists of 21 partners from 9 EU countries, united in their vision to build a sustainable future for connected and automated vehicles.

The project aims to provide the ICT infrastructure to enable the transition towards road transport automation. ICT4CART is bringing together, adapting and improving technological advances from different industries, mainly the telecommunication, automotive and IT industries.

The project adopts a hybrid communication approach where all the major wireless technologies, i.e. cellular, ITS G5 and LTE-V, are integrated under flexible “sliced” network architecture. This architecture will ensure performance and resilience for different groups of applications according to the needs of higher levels of automation. On top of that, a distributed IT environment for data aggregation and analytics will be implemented.

The project is coordinated by the Institute of Communication & Computer Systems (ICCS) with partners in the project including Airbus, Bosch, BMW, IBM and Nokia amongst others.Urban Foresight is the only UK-based partner in the project and is leading the market analysis and business model synthesis for the programme. In doing so, we will ensure that there are economically viable outcomes to the research and development of these technologies.

Dr David Beeton said, “Urban Foresight is thrilled to be bringing our expertise in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles and innovative business models to this exciting and important project. We will be working with organisations across the consortium to address two key questions: What do end-users need from ICT infrastructure for automated vehicles? And how should this infrastructure and associated services be paid for?”

The result of this allows seamless integration and the exchange of data and services between all the different actors, encouraging third parties to develop, deliver and provide innovative services, thus creating new business opportunities. Cyber-security and data privacy aspects will be considered throughout the entire ICT infrastructure. In addition, innovative accurate localisation services, exploiting the cellular network and information from other sources, such as on-board sensors, especially in complex areas (e.g. urban), will be addressed. Standardisation and interoperability are of high interest within ICT4CART in order to ensure the project facilitates the transition to higher levels of automation. In this context, issues related to the frequency spectrum will be investigated, and with the organisation of relevant workshops the engagement of policy makers and public authorities will be ensured.

Instead of working in generic solutions with questionable impact, ICT4CART builds on four specific high-value use cases (urban and highway) which will be demonstrated and validated under real-life conditions at the project test sites in Austria, Germany, Italy and across the Italian-Austrian border.

In September, Urban Foresight’s Paul Blakeman and Emma Clement were in Athens for the official kick-off meeting. Paul, Urban Foresight’s Head of Innovation, will be leading UF’s involvement in the consortium. Find out more about the project and the consortium, including all project partners in the press release here.


This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 768953. Content reflects only the authors’ view and European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

 

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