Transportation and Logistics
This field deals with all spatial and time-related activities involved in bridging the gap between goods and people, including their restructuring. This begins with the supplier and follows each stage of the operational value chain to product delivery and concludes with product disposal and recycling.
innovations-report provides informative reports and articles on such topics as traffic telematics, toll collection, traffic management systems, route planning, high-speed rail (Transrapid), traffic infrastructures, air safety, transport technologies, transport logistics, production logistics and mobility.
Live ’Plug & Play’ environment for service providers
Open telematic platforms offer the possibility of integrating Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) components by allowing service providers and equipment manufacturers to test, upgrade or demonstrate their products, services, equipment and standards free of charge. SMITH provides such a platform helping to guarantee that adopted solutions comply with existing and emerging European standards.
Testbed contributes to ITS standards
The quality manager of the IST programme funded
Ohio State designs robotic truck that will race across the desert — with no driver
At 2.5 tons and 9 feet high, the truck that Ohio State University engineers are about to race across the Mojave Desert could literally crush the competition.
And it would do so without a driver.
Of course, the truck won’t be squashing its rivals — the purpose of the competition is to design vehicles that can drive autonomously and avoid obstacles, rather than run them over.
With no human intervention and only global positioning system and local sensing data to guid
EGNOS improves safety for maritime navigation in China
The fog today is hanging heavy on the Yangtze River making conditions for navigation rather difficult, however one ferry goes forward with no special worries. The captain is using the highly accurate satellite navigation system, EGNOS.
The European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) is an initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Commission and Eurocontrol.
This boat trip is the first trial testing satellite navigation with EGNOS in China and is the first
Moving ahead with standardised traffic and travel information
A breakthrough broadcast technology designed to deliver Traffic and Travel Information (TTI) has been tested and validated by the TPEG project. Project partners have further developed a new and open international standard for broadcasting language independent multimodal TTI to be distributed over a wide range of digital media.
Use of TPEG industry-wide will allow the development of powerful systems to manage and display travel news. In addition, developers will be able to create systems and
Innovative system for testing tunnel safety
LABEIN Tecnological Centre, based in the Basque Country, has developed an innovative system for verifying tunnel safety in the case of fire. The new system, developed at the request of the Gipuzkoa Provincial Government, has been successfully tested in the new Lezarri (Bergara) tunnel on the A1 Eibar-Vitoria motorway.
The novel element in the testing set up by LABEIN, compared to other systems used to date, is that the verification can be carried out in a short period (about 8 hours) and wit
Overcoming the problems of legacy infrastructure
Just as roads need to be repaved and highways repaired, the technological infrastructure that guides traffic also has to be kept up-to-date. But updating traffic management systems can be costly, as new applications and devices are often not designed to interoperate with older systems. Overcoming this problem is the IST project OMNI’s prototype platform that allows traffic authorities to integrate the new while retaining the old, thereby protecting past investments.
“There are high inve