Madrid hosts the kick-off meeting of the MOBILITIES FOR EU consortium

31 January, 2024

The IoTMADLab (led by CEDINT-UPM and the Digital Office of Madrid City Council) participates in the ‘New Mobility solutions for climate neutrality in EU Cities‘ initiative, along with the cities of Madrid and Dresden, as well as different partners from Spain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Finland, Poland, Greece, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Within the framework of the European Mission ‘Climate-neutral and smart cities‘, the goal of this project is to analyze the state of the art of technology through real demonstrators: autonomous vehicles for the transport of people and goods, powered by a viable electric grid that adjusts a market in which demand and photovoltaic production vary independently.

Through a participatory process focused on users, Urban Transport Laboratories are defined as elements that facilitate the replication of the lessons learned in the proposed pilots to be developed in Mercamadrid and Dresden. The project consists of defining the organization of these UT-Labs, carrying out the demonstrator projects, establishing how to measure the results, packaging them, and, finally, replicating them in other cities.

In this way, the EU aims to establish best practices to facilitate and accelerate the green and digital transition, and connected, electric, and autonomous vehicles. The initiative is part of the mission of the 100 climate-neutral cities by 2030. Madrid’s commitment has meant that the Spanish capital is the largest city of the 10 that have already signed a contract in this regard (CCC).

Out of 27 proposals for this call, the EU has selected 2 in a call for 50M€. The consortium led by Madrid and Dresden has been allocated a budget of almost 25M€. Almost half corresponds to Madrid’s part.

The leading cities, Madrid and Dresden, will carry out the ‘MOBILITIES FOR EU’ initiative. Between both cities, 11 pilot projects will be launched, including 27 innovative solutions for the mobility of people and goods, exploiting the potential of electrification, automation, and connectivity, from the design phases to implementation and evaluation.

Madrid and Dresden also aspire to act as pioneers in this process, leveraging the many existing social commitment and empowerment initiatives that will be integrated into the idea of Urban Transport Laboratories (UT-Labs), conceived as innovation centers with the aim of promoting an expansion and replicability at the EU scale. Thus, there will be 5 Replicating Cities: Ioaninna, Trencin, Espoo, Gdansk, and Sarajevo.

More specifically, in Madrid, 5 pilots will be implemented in the scenarios of Mercamadrid, and in the nearby Operations Center of the Municipal Transport Company (EMT) in Entrevías.

Mercamadrid is the largest market in Spain and one of the most active in Europe, employing 8,000 people and supplying other 46 markets in the city and also a very extensive area in the center of the country. Therefore, as efficient mobility solutions, pilots have been proposed for autonomous electric vehicles for transporting people and goods, using 5G technology, and operating in an intelligent urban space with interoperable IoT devices, an electric grid based on renewable energy sources, on a “smart grid” that uses digital twin and artificial intelligence technologies, efficient charging and electrification of goods fleets, bidirectional G2V and V2G chargers, integrated with an energy data market, and implementation of hydrogen refueling stations and 10 buses powered by green hydrogen fuel cells.

In this context, on January 30 and 31 and February 1, the kick-off meeting of the ‘MOBILITIES FOR EU’ initiative is held in Mercamadrid. The first two days aim to bring together all project partners and work on the objectives and expected results, as well as to coordinate, plan, and launch the first activities to be carried out. For this, sessions, workshops, presentations, and visits will be developed.

On the third day, the institutional launch of the project is held with a formal meeting and dialogue of cities, with the support and presence of institutional representatives, in order to create an initial connection between the cities of the project and publicly present their position on the path towards sustainability.

MOBILITIES FOR EU is a key initiative in the Digital Transformation Strategy of the Madrid City Council (2023-2027), ‘Madrid, Digital Capital‘, defined to ensure that the city continues to be a benchmark in the digital field. With the pilots to be implemented in Mercamadrid, as well as the configuration of an Intelligent Urban Space in the market, it contributes to the co-creation and construction of a city managed with data, with automated and interconnected services, that allow evaluating the impact and scaling the solutions found, as well as promoting innovative and disruptive digital technologies such as 5G, digital twin, and artificial intelligence.

More details here

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