Shaping Cities and Vehicles for a Common Future
With the 11th edition of CARNET’s Symposium on Urban Mobility Challenges, CARNET once again became the center of mobility innovation for the day. Experts, industry leaders and academics from all around the world came to Barcelona to discuss innovative concepts and implementations for a better future in urban mobility. Hosted by CARNET at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Enginyeria de Camins, Canals i Ports de Barcelona, the event connected international experts over cross-disciplinary mobility innovations and trends. Specifically, new ideas and cases in autonomous vehicles, data-driven decision support, and innovative infrastructure in mobility were shared amongst the participants.
Under the “Shaping Cities and Vehicles for a Common Future” topic, the Symposium focused on understanding how future vehicles fit into these growing cities by examining how cities are using data to shape their transport strategies, how impact evaluation is being integrated into decision-making processes, and how innovation plays a pivotal role in developing adaptable, efficient, and sustainable mobility systems.
The symposium opened with welcome remarks from the organizations collaborating to enable the innovation at CARNET: Prof. Dr. Lluís Jofre Roca, CARNET’s Academic Director from UPC, Santiago Hermida, representing SEAT’s R&D partnerships, and Alexander Siebeneich, Industrial Director at CARNET. They set the focus for the coming talk – the rapid changes in mobility, the need of integrated concepts in mobility and city planning, and the following collaboration between entities from academia, administration and industry.
The event’s keynote was delivered by Guido di Pasquale, Managing director at PAVE Europe. He showed advancements in autonomous vehicles and raised the question on how to integrate those in modern, centralized mobility concepts. He showed the use of autonomous vehicles beyond individual travel and how to design them as complementary instead of competitors to public transport.
Usage of Data
For every modern innovation, data comes first. Hence, the symposium addressed this in the first panel moderated by Dr. Cecilio Angulo, Full professor at UPC and founder of IDEAI-UPC. With Ishmala Imtiaz, Model Automation Specialist at PTV Group, Dr. Miquel Estrada, Full Professor (UPC) and Member of BIT UPC and CARNET´s academic committee, and Dr. Oliva Garcia Cantú Ros, Chief Research and Development Officer at NOMMON, experts from different backgrounds discussed the subject. While they showed different insightful approaches to the issue, they all emphasized the importance of data and the need to find models fitting to the data available and to gather data from new sources for enhanced resolution.
City Integration and Evaluation
When we have enough data and information, integrated mobility planning for cities is enabled. To look further into this, Christian Bardají, Director of the Mobility area at RACC, moderated the second panel. It gathered experienced planners from several entities: Soledad Pérez-Galdós Enríquez de Salamanca, Infrastructure and Innovation Coordinator at CRT Madrid, Manuel Crespo, senior project manager at CINESI, and Mariona Conill, mobility engineer at AMB. In their different approaches on transport and mobility planning, they discussed ways of creating a more integrated, less individualistic and more active type of urban mobility. Stemming from different authorities, they provided applied examples of innovative and human-centered planning already being in use.
Addressing Innovation
The last panel discussed making innovation real by bringing new ideas to the cities. This was moderated by Andrés Monzón, Professor of Transport Engineering (UPM) and CIIMA-UP4 Mentor. He was joined by impactful innovators: Dr. Christian Schlitzberger, Senior Manager for Connected Energy Systems and Volkswagen Group Innovation, Willem-Frederik Metzelaar, Head of Innovation Hub West at EIT Urban Mobility, and Prof. Dr.-Ing Thomas Vietor, Full Professor at TU Braunschweig (NFF). In their talks, they presented numerous examples of successful innovation in energy grid and battery management, public transport planning, and vehicle system design.
The symposium was wrapped up with some insightful words by Miguel Ángel Fernández Ros, Digital Innovation Manager at Telefónica, and Dr. Jordi Berenguer Sau, Vice Chancellor of Transfer, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UPC: They stressed the urgency of transformation and innovation in mobility, putting the relevance of the CARNET-orchestrated projects in the spotlight. In the words of Dr. Jordi Berenguer: “CARNET is our do tank: the place where ideas born in our laboratories are tested in real-world environments, validated, and prepared to transform the city. It is the demonstration that public-private collaboration is not an option: it is the only way forward.”
The 11th edition of CARNET’s Symposium on Urban Mobility Challenges once again proved the impact of cross-disciplinary discussion of pressing issues as a driver of the innovation provided by CARNET projects. The symposium proves itself relevant for key stakeholders and mobility researchers aiming for innovation. Accordingly, CARNET already awaits next year’s edition of the symposium with new insights from mobility innovation.
