Overview
In a world faced with increasing urbanisation, the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce, and the intricate web of transportation stakeholders, the challenges in passenger and freight mobility have reached critical proportions. For years, we have grappled with a fragmented transport system that treats passengers and freight as separate entities, leading to a lack of coordination and efficiency. With this in mind, the EU-funded DELPHI project will apply cutting-edge technologies such as UAS-powered monitoring and AI/ML-powered algorithms to streamline traffic management and enable seamless data sharing across sectors. The project is conducting four pilot programmes, each tailored to specific requirements and ecosystems. DELPHI is poised to reshape the future of transportation, making it smarter, more efficient, and interconnected.
Growing challenges are identified during the last years in both passenger and freight mobility, such as urbanization trends, the increasing complexity of stakeholder scene, e-commerce, rising fragmentation of freight transport. Despite the various technical challenges and shortcomings, current governance and regulatory systems have proven so far inadequate, dealing with the passengers and freight transport systems as independent -and thus disconnected- sectors while integration between passenger and freight transport has been a subject of debate in the transport community over the last years with a peak coming after the recent Covid19 crisis. DELPHI focuses on the strategic dimension of integrating passenger and freight transport in a single system aiming to deliver the enablers -both on technical and governance/regulatory level, towards a federated network of platforms for multimodal passenger and freight transport, capable of sharing in a seamless and secure manner, cross-sectoral, multi-modal passenger and freight transport data, as well as traffic management systems information. Moreover, DELPHI will utilise novel and ultra-efficient methodologies for traffic monitoring such as UAS-powered monitoring, multi-/inter-modal optimisation, AI/ML-powered algorithms and frameworks, and will exploit diverse modes for hybrid passenger and freight transport in different ecosystem types. To achieve its maximum potential, utmost interoperability and best optimisation results, DELPHI’s digital framework and transversal tools will be validated in the context of 4 pilots with complementary requirements and features.