Project description
Next-generation e-mobility for a sustainable urban living
The management of logistics flows in urban areas becomes a challenging process within the context of intensive urbanisation. There is a growing need for sustainable mobility solutions that combine transport flexibility and high performance, low operational costs, safety and health security. The EU-funded URBANIZED project will introduce the next generation of modular vehicle architectures for urban-sized commercial e-vehicles. Focusing on a holistic design approach working at systems, vehicle and fleet level, URBANIZED will offer a comprehensive modular solution for last-mile delivery of retail, e-commerce, courier and post, HoReCa and other urban on-demand services.
Objective
The steadily growing demand related to increasing urbanisation is turning the management of logistics flows in urban areas a more complex process, with higher demand for adaptability and flexibility for the new solutions to contribute to optimise the overall transport capacity, reducing operational costs and negative impacts (health, safety). URBANIZED develops and demonstrates the next generation of modular vehicle architectures for urban-sized commercial e-vehicles, satisfying design principles of optimisation and right-sizing vehicles for their mission, delivering outputs in 3 dimensions: 1) high-performance e-powertrain components and control architectures, through the use of advanced co-design approaches; 2) interchangeable, plug & play cargo modules for different urban freight transport use case scenarios and 3) integrated energy and fleet management strategies using data, connectivity and learning algorithms. URBANIZED follows a holistic design approach working at 3 levels (systems, vehicle, fleet) during the entire project: starting with the definition of specific mission profiles within 2 main pre-selected use cases (last-mile delivery of retail, e-commerce, courier and post; HoReCa and other urban on-demand services), during the optimisation loops of the design process, and until project demonstrations, to be performed both physical and in virtual environments, covering the specific requirements of operators. URBANIZED brings a complementary multi-disciplinary consortium of 9 partners from 6 EU countries, involving all relevant actors from the value chain, from academic, to industrial (TIER1, OEMs) and logistics operators. Aiming at broadening dissemination and impact, URBANIZED defines an extended partnership, involving 3 satellite cities (Groningen, Madrid and Bergen) committed to CO2-emissions free logistics in their city centres by 2030 and a high volume OEM (Ford) highly positioned in the LCV market, all interested in replicability of project results.
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
43710 Santa Oliva
Spain