CARNET at the 6th Doctoral Training Network Forum in Lisbon
Two of CARNET’s researchers recently participated in EIT Urban Mobility’s 6th Doctoral Training Network (DTN) Forum in Lisbon, a Europe-wide programme that supports PhD researchers in combining academic work with practical skills, international collaboration, and innovation in urban mobility. The event complements doctoral research with practical training in business skills, international collaboration, and real-world application of new mobility solutions. Each year, the DTN hosts an Annual Forum, a flagship event gathering experts, scholars, and city representatives to discuss the latest advancements in mobility. In 2025, the 6th Annual DTN Forum took place over three days in Lisbon, Portugal, serving as a platform for PhD candidates to present their work, engage in discussions, and foster collaborations aimed at solving urban mobility challenges. CARNET participated in this year’s forum by supporting its doctoral researcher, Gerard Franco-Panadés, and its visiting doctoral researcher, Noah Gollnick.
The DTN Annual Forum’s agenda was full of interactive sessions designed to accelerate the research journey. Training modules led by academic and industry experts focused on turning innovative ideas into impact, covering topics like how to quantify societal benefits and how to plan for technology transfer into the market. Participants attended short courses on research methods and tools and workshops on practical skills.
One highlight of the Lisbon forum was the Research Poster Pitching session, where PhD candidates presented their ongoing work. CARNET was represented by Gerard Franco-Panadés, a doctoral researcher from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), and Noah Gollnick, a visiting doctoral researcher at CARNET from TU Braunschweig. Each was given just a few minutes to pitch their research. In their presentations, they detailed the problem they are addressing, their approach and data, early findings, and the potential impact of their work.
Gerard Franco-Panadés presented his research on deep-learning models for traffic-flow and road-safety prediction. His pitch highlighted new results showing that explicitly encoding road geometry, such as curvature, slope, and lane count, significantly improves model accuracy and generalisation. The strongest gains were observed in predictions of speed profiles and heavy-vehicle intensity, where geometric features act as key explanatory factors.
Noah Gollnick’s presentation focused on innovative business models for shared mobility. Drawing on his research at TU Braunschweig, Noah examines how ride-hailing services and other shared mobility platforms can be optimized through data analytics and machine learning. In Lisbon, he shared insights into “meta-platform” business models – essentially, how various mobility services can be integrated or coordinated to improve efficiency and user experience.
The DTN 6th Annual Forum offered practical exchanges that helped sharpen research focus, surface collaboration opportunities, and clarify what it takes to move from promising prototypes to deployable urban mobility services. These activities are important because they shorten the path from research to real deployment: they expose doctoral work to real constraints, build the skills needed to engage non-academic stakeholders, and create partnerships with cities and industry that enable pilots, data access, and scaling. By aligning methods with operational requirements—data governance, interfaces, maintenance—and by fostering reproducibility across contexts, initiatives like the DTN help ensure that promising ideas become tested, useful solutions for urban mobility.
