Evaluation and assessment framework for FTMAAS Living Lab

With the increasing uncertainty surrounding unexpected events like Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and the threats of international financial and economic crisis, technological innovation, automation, and digitalization may provide adequate solutions to solve urgent economic, environmental and societal challenges.

In transport and logistics sectors, automation and digitalization are considered as a key enabler in the transition towards a sustainable transport and logistics system. In logistics, digitalization is driven by private stakeholders in the manufacturing and services sector, supporting tactical and operational management problems such as inventory and transport planning, routing, and scheduling. In transport and traffic management, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) applications focus on the collective of vehicles – both for freight and people – in traffic flows, aiming to optimize capacity use and resilience. In this perspective, developments in ITS are mainly driven by road authorities, and most of the ITS solutions have not yet been implemented into logistics operations, although both actors in logistics and traffic management could benefit from a more integrated approach. Therefore, the integration of transport logistics and traffic management is still the main innovation challenge to transport and logistics actors, as they are both confronted to the same sustainability challenges and are both are affected by the effects of congestion and travel time uncertainties. In this perspective, unlocking the potential of an integrated system is of great importance. Promising advanced solutions include customization of travel time predictions, traffic management measures for specific user groups and dynamic planning and routing, which can lead to more efficient routing decisions, less traffic, less congestion, decrease in number of deaths, and lower emissions. Also, carriers can provide traffic managers with traffic status or routing information to improve their predictions or inform infrastructure changes. Benefits are found in the wider traffic system as well in the private logistics operations. At the research level, current transport and logistics models focus on abstract models that design and solve optimal operational processes, e.g., a routing schedule that finds the optimal balance between high service level and low cost. The solutions provided by these models are seldom applied and compared to how these solution ideas fit into the existing real business processes of both the problem owners and the solution providers, and how does these solutions translate into their business models. In filling this gap, the FTMAAS research project takes into consideration all the elements of the existing business processes and related business models by assessing both business value (higher service levels) and societal impact (less emission and less congestion) based on real-life experiments of different use cases (pilots) in a living lab environment. The main objective of this project is to connect logistics and traffic management sub-systems by developing, testing, and implementing integrating applications that have significant impact on logistic performance of the companies and on traffic networks, especially at the level of the corridors.