Overview
During the past few years many projects and initiatives were undertaken deploying and testing Automated Vehicles (AVs) for public transportation and logistics. However in spite of their ambition, all of these projects stayed on the level of elaborated experimentation and never reached the level of a large-scale commercial deployment of transport services. The reasons for this are many, the most important being the lack of economically viable and commercially realistic models, the lack of scalability of the business and operating models, and the lack of user oriented services required for large end-user adoption of the solutions.
The ULTIMO project will create the very first economically feasible and sustainable integration of AVs for MaaS public transportation and LaaS urban goods transportation. ULTIMO aims to deploy in three sites in Europe 15 or more multi-vendor SAE L4 AVs per site.
A user centric holistic approach, applied throughout the project, will ensure that all elements in a cross-sector business environment are incorporated to deliver large-scale on-demand, door-to-door, well-accepted, shared, seamless-integrated and economically viable CCAM services. We target the operation without safety driver on-board, in a fully automated and mission management mode with the support of innovative user centric passenger services.
ULTIMO’s innovative transportation models are designed for a long-term sustainable impact on automated transportation in Europe, around the globe and on society. The composition of the consortium ensures the interoperability between multiple stakeholders by making adoption of new technology at minimum costs and maximum safety. The integration of the ongoing experiments of previous AV-demonstrator projects ensures highest possible technical and societal impacts from the very beginning of the project, as well as during the project lifetime and even long after its completion.