AUTOFLEX is an EU-funded research project facilitating the transition to climate-friendly, flexible and resilient transport. The initiative will help develop new autonomous inland cargo vessels that can reliably carry out transport services in small waterways, even in confined waters and in extremely low water situations. Furthermore, it will design new distribution hubs as an interface to road transport, which will ensure both cargo transshipment and zero-emission energy supply for the ships and trucks at the same time. Two use cases, situated in the Randstad region between Rotterdam and Amsterdam and in the East Flemish city of Ghent, will put the new concepts to the test. The use cases will validate ship concepts, establish a roadmap for exploitation, make recommendations to policy and industry, and propose interface standards.

To reduce the societal and climate impacts of transport, AUTOFLEX will develop solutions for enabling a modal shift from trucks to inland waterway transport, and for electrification of both modes. The key is to acknowledge that electrification of transport has an impact on vessel and vehicle operations and must therefore be tightly integrated with the transport operations by both modes (integration of cargo and energy distribution). The AUTOFLEX scope is therefore to: 1) Develop small autonomous un-crewed zero-emission inland vessels that can operate on underutilised waterways, that are resilient towards low water events, and are competitive. 2) Develop transport system components and an architecture that enables transhipment between modes, urban distribution, and strong competition with road transport. 3) Develop a combined cargo and energy hub (Stow&Charge) for generating and distributing electric energy for the transport system. 4) Develop new business models for operating the transport system, providing services for the transport system, and for offering services based on the transport system (e.g. energy and urban logistics). 5) Validate the ship concepts and transport system through simulation and quantitative analysis, scale model testing and demonstration, and full-scale demonstration. 6) Develop a roadmap for exploitation, recommendations to policy and industry, steps towards realisation, and propose KET interface standards.

AUTOFLEX enables zero emission transport (waterborne and road), innovative port infrastructure, climate neutral and climate resilient waterway vessels, integration of shipping into logistic chains, safe and efficient fully automated and connected shipping, and competitive waterborne European industries.