TRA 2024 STAND Programme

ECTRI, EURNEX and FEHRL have once again joined forces to offer a unique space at the TRA exhibition “the research village associations” to meet, exchange and network with our Members and stakeholders.

During Tuesday and Thursday lunch breaks, several ECTRI Members experts will present their latest innovative projects and activities.

Tuesday – 16 April 2024

13:30 — 13:50 | InCITIES – Trailblazing Inclusive, Sustainable and Resilient Cities, Tatiana Kováčiková (UNIZA, Slovakia) and Claude Marin-Lamellet (UNI EIFFEL)

The InCITIES project aims to achieve the transformations of HEIs and their surrounding ecosystem centred around on cities’ needs of inclusion, sustainability and resilience. Its specific focus on widening countries (Portugal and Slovakia) will allow to overcome
structural, sociocultural, economic, political and institutional barriers.
Addressing the European-global challenges of cities, InCITIES has 4 objectives:
1) Map institutional transformation strategies towards research-based sustainable universities including open science and career opportunities.
2) Build a long-term network of participating HEIs and surrounding ecosystems based on integrated knowledge HUBs.
3) Increase scientific, technological and staff capacity by sharing the best pedagogical, research, management and administrative practices in the consortium, and piloting leverages to widening HEIs.
4) Promote digitally driven universities by creating an open and innovative education and training platform in synergy with the project research and innovation agenda on inclusive, sustainable and resilient cities.

Prof. Tatiana Kováčiková, PhD. has been the Head of the Department of International Research Projects – ERAdiate+ at the University of Zilina, Slovakia, since July 1, 2019. She graduated from telecommunications at the University of Transport and Telecommunications in Slovakia. She is professor in Applied Informatics. From October 1, 2017 till June 30, 2019, she was the ERA Chair Holder for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) at the University of Zilina. From 2013 till 2015, she held the position of the Head of Science Operations at the COST Association in Brussels. She was involved in ICT&ITS standardization in ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) for more than 15 years, and represented Slovakia in CEN TC 278 on ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems). She is a member of the ECTRI Executive Board. Her research interests include communication protocols, services and applications for CCAM (Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility), and sustainable and inclusive mobility. She has been involved in a large number of European research projects under EU Framework Programmes (FP7, H2020, Horizon Europe), Interreg Europe and Interreg DTP.  

Claude Marin-Lamellet, PhD, Research Director, Deputy vice-president International at Université Gustave Eiffel, France. Since 2020, Deputy vice-president International at Université Gustave Eiffel : involved in the follow up of the design process of the new European program Horizon Europe and supervised for the university the development of the new PPP Partnership among them the CCAM, 2ZERO and DUT. From 2016 to 2020, deputy director of the European and International Division at Ifsttar (National research institute of transport and infrastructure) From 1995 to 2015, research director at IFSTTAR in human factor issues for assistive technology systems, for drivers or public transport users, with an interest in the older people and people with disabilities. Have been involved in more than 10 European projects; actively involved with TRB activities and attended the annual meeting each year, made several oral presentations in podium sessions, and served as an active member of the “Accessible Transport and Mobility” Committee (from 2005 to 2015).

13:50 — 14:10 | Integrated Mobility Planning for Sustainable and Livable Cities, Stefan Seer and Christian Kogler (AIT, Austria)

Cities are pressured to implement measures against climate change and thus the sustainable transformation of mobility systems is one of their key components. Integrated mobility planning is a dynamic approach that aims to synchronize various modes of transportation within urban environments to optimize efficiency, accessibility, and sustainability. AIT is working on solutions to plan for seamlessly integrating public transit, cycling infrastructure, pedestrian pathways, and emerging mobility solutions like autonomous vehicles and shared mobility services. This holistic strategy not only addresses the challenges of traffic congestion, air pollution, and inclusive mobility but also facilitates the creation of holistic urban master plans with integrated impact assessment methodologies. Co-creation platforms developed at AIT’s City Intelligence Lab foster collaborative urban and transport planning processes to design responsive urban systems tailored to individual and collective needs.

Dr. Stefan Seer is currently a Senior Scientist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna, where he heads the “Urban Development & Mobility Transformation” research group – an interdisciplinary team of experts in engineering, computer science, mathematics, architecture, transport, and urban planning. Their mission is to improve urban systems’ reliability, making them more efficient, safe, and sustainable. He is also a Research Affiliate at the SENSEable City Lab at the MIT. Stefan’s work focuses on using technology to enhance urban public spaces and multimodal transportation. He is specialized in data science, models for simulating and predicting human mobility, and co-creation and participatory design. He has 15+ years of experience managing complex projects involving diverse stakeholders from academia, public, and private sectors across continents. Stefan is also chairing the Thematic Group on ”Traffic Management and Modelling” at ECTRI. Stefan holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Vienna University of Technology and a Master’s Degree in Electronics Engineering, specializing in Computer Science and Systems Technology. Stefan is a prolific author, with numerous publications in top-tier journals, and a sought-after speaker at international conferences and invited lectures.

14:10 — 14:30 | ADMIRAL – Advanced Multimodal Marketplace for Low Emission  and Low Energy Transportation, Markku Mikkola (VTT, Finland), Elisabete Arsenio (LNEC, Portugal), José Manuel Vassallo (UPM, Spain) and Vânia Marecos (LNEC, Portugal)

ADMIRAL is an EU project which seeks to develop and pilot AI-driven solutions for managing logistics supply chains, including related missions to reduce transport and logistics emissions and increase transparency, resilience of logistics supply chains, and stakeholder cooperation.

Markku Mikkola works as a Senior Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd. and as the ADMIRAL WP3 leader. He holds an M.Sc. degree from the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management. He has extensive research experience in business model and business process development in companies and their networks, focusing especially on order-delivery processes, R&D processes and service business models.

Elisabete Arsenio is Principal Investigator at the LNEC Department of Transportation and the ADMIRAL WP2 Leader. She holds a Doctor (Ph.D.) degree from the University of Leeds, Institute of Transport Studies (ITS). She’s the Leader of the Transport Economics and Policies (ECOPOL) Group of the European Conference of Transport Research Institutes (ECTRI) that includes 43 experts from major transport research institutes or universities in Europe.

 Jose Manuel Vassallo is Professor in the Department of Transportation Engineering, Urban and Regional Planning at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. He belongs to the Transportation Research Centre (TRANSyT) of that university, and is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Ministry of Transportation of Spain. His area of research is transportation economics, business models for new mobility services and sustainability appraisal of mobility solutions.

Vânia Marecos is assistant researcher at the LNEC Department of Transportation. She holds a PhD from the University of Vigo. She develops research in the field of road and airfield infrastructures; applications for BIM data in highways asset management systems. She has also experience in the field of structural health monitoring, addressing load tests, long-term monitoring and structural safety analysis of bridges.

Thursday – 18 April 2024

13:15 — 13:35 | MetaCCAZE: Flexible adapted MetaInnovations, use case, collaborative business and governance models to accelerate shared Zero Emission mobility for passengers and freight, Koliou Paraskevi and George Yannis (NTUA, Greece)

MetaCCAZE’s project vision is to accelerate the deployment of smart systems that combine electric automated and connected mobility and related infrastructure by developing flexibly adapted to current and evolving SUMP-needs, resilient and transferable technologies; infuse them with user-centric approaches to zero emission shared mobility services for passengers and goods, test, deploy and monitor them in 10 Mission Cities across 10 different European countries, and streamline and adapt generated knowledge to any city to build capacity and skills to implement smart shared and zero-emission mobility systems and pave the way towards climate neutral, safe and smart EU cities.

Εvi Koliou is a Civil Engineer, currently working as a Research Associate at the Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Since 2019, she holds a Civil Engineering Diploma from NTUA majoring in Transportation Engineering. Since 2024, she also holds a PhD, Doctor of Philosophy, from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, at Imperial College London, United Kingdom with research topic on Intelligent Mobility and Transport Planning. Her Ph.D. research was on: “Vehicle-to-Vehicle Connectivity for Real-time Traffic Incident Detection on Motorways: A Traffic Microsimulation Study”. She has more than five (5) years of experience in several aspects of traffic engineering and road safety and mobility. She has co-supervised, during her Ph.D. studies 4 MEng students and 6 MSc students while she worked as a university teacher assistant for four (4) years at Loughborough university and at Imperial College London. She has participated in two (2) research projects (academic and industrial) while she has attended many scientific conferences. She also been part of National Highways since 2019, a government-owned company charged with operating, maintaining and improving motorways and major A, as National Highways funded her Ph.D. and she worked in project of them for four (4) years. More information: https://www.nrso.ntua.gr/p/evi-koliou/  

George Yannis is Professor and Director of the Department of Transportation Planning Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He leads the NTUA Road Safety Observatory, a Center of Research and Innovation Excellence with global recognition for its highly valuable contribution to safer mobility for all, in Greece, in Europe and worldwide. He has a thorough and broad understanding of the transportation sector, through his active involvement for more than 30 years as engineer, academic, advisor and decision maker in all areas of transportation planning and engineering at national and international level, with emphasis on data science. He has contributed extensively in more than 315 research and engineering projects and studies and in several scientific committees of the European Commission and other International Organisations (UNECE, OECD, WHO, World Bank, EIB, CEDR, ERF, IRF, PIARC, UITP, ETSC, ECTRI, WCTR, TRB). He has published 870 scientific papers (246 in scientific journals) widely cited worldwide. He is currently running 30 Marathons in 30 months in order to actively promote the adoption of 30km/h speed limit in as many cities as possible worldwide, as a key policy for safer, healthier and greener cities. More information: www.nrso.ntua.gr/geyannis

13:35 — 13:55 |  Mobility Data Spaces Landscape, Svenja Hainz (DLR, Germany)

Mobility Data Spaces Landscape – the work of DLR in Data Space projects like Catena-X and Gaia-X: We would like to present our work on data spaces including topics like consideration of data privacy and data sovereignty or data quality management.

Svenja Hainz is leading the team on Data Spaces at DLR’s institute for AI Safety and Security. In this capacity she is coordinating and supporting the researchers who are working on creating fair and secure data spaces for different sectors. Until January 2024 she represented the interest of the German Aerospace Center (DLR e.V.) at European level in the field of transportation research. The collaboration with European bodies such as the European Commission and the European Parliament were part of her responsibilities as well as engagement in DLR’s European strategy processes. Through her work in committees and technology platforms and her consultancy for DLR’s CEO, executive board and programme director, she insured DLR’s involvement in the European research community and access to EU funding.

Svenja Hainz has a Master of Science degree in transportation planning and operation from the Technical University of Berlin (Germany), 2017 as well as a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technical University of Dresden (Germany), 2014. Parallel to her studies in 2016, Svenja Hainz worked in the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, where she supported the public participation process for the Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan 2030 by handling submitted comments and drafting public statements among others. In 2017, she joined DLR as a scientific researcher at the Institute of Transportation Systems with her main focus lying on the integrated impact assessment of railways systems. In the Shift2Rail project IMPACT-1 she was responsible for the development of a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) model assessing the impact of the Shift2Rail programme in the future railway sector and took over the WP lead in the successor project IMPACT-2 until 2020.

13:55 — 14:15 |  Road Infrastructure Assessment, Modelling and Safety Evaluation within AIT Transportation Infrastructure Technologies, Andreas Hula (AIT, Austria)

Road Infrastructure Assessment, Modelling and Safety Evaluation within AIT Transportation Infrastructure Technologies, as part of the Center for Transport Technologies at the Austrian Institute of Technology, offers solutions at the forefront of infrastructure research:

  • Our RoadSTAR and RoadLAB measurement vehicles can collect road data and support the setting up of digital twins even on narrow sidepaths, using machine learning techniques to efficiently detect defects in the path.
  • Our Motorcycle probe vehicle (MoProVe) allows to model driver behaviour and identify and address risks for motorcyclists, a crucial group of vulnerable road users.
  • These solutions are now joined by the bikeSTAR probevehicle, an instrumented cargobike, promising infrastructure research and riding risk assessment for cyclists too.
  • We also provide an easy to deploy video-based method of analysing road user interactions to evaluate risk areas and infrastructure enhancements with focus on VRU safety in an urban context.
  • We support development of solutions with industry partners, as well as with other research institutions in large European research projects frequently.
  • We would like to give you a brief overview of the results that can be achieved when employing these methods, to practical problems in mobility.

Dr Andreas Hula: Studied Mathematics in the Natural Sciences at Vienna University of Technology from 2001 till January 2006. Obtained a PhD in Mathematical Finance, on tractable interest rate models, in January 2010. After research activities in Mathematical Finance (on portfolio selection using control theoretic approaches) at Dublin City University (2010-2012), a position as research associate (post-doctoral researcher) at University College London (2012-2017). From December 2017 has been working as a Scientist at Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), first in the Center of Mobility Systems (2017-2020), then in the Center for Transport Technologies (since 2021) as a member of the Competence Unit for Transportation Infrastructure Technologies in both instances. Main area of expertise and focus of current work is building stochastic models for road safety (risk models) and infrastructure maintenance (predictive maintenance) based on probe vehicle data, aiming to improve safety, comfort and integration in digital representations of road infrastructure.