Overview
Around 50% of the global population live in metropolitan areas, and this is likely to grow to 75% by 2050. Across Europe cities are stable aggregates with large expanding suburbs. These metropolitan areas become the centre of attraction of very complex and wide regions. These metropolitan areas need to grow in an efficient, sustainable, and resilient way. In this context, the 2011 European Mobility White Paper makes a smarter, safer, greener, more affordable, seamless and integrated transport a key element of the European development policy for the next 50 years. Mobility within a wide metropolitan area is a complex system involving multiple modalities of transport (e.g. walking, trains, cars, buses, underground, freight, etc.), multiple managing authorities (e.g. the Turin metropolitan area is overseen by over 300 city councils, a couple of motorway companies, the national road organisation, as well as the Province of Turin Council and the Piedmont Region Authority), as well as several million citizens. Mobility in the cities is becoming more and more complex due to the high complexity deriving from the more erratic patterns of the everyday life compared to two decades ago. Traffic congestion costs the EU economy an estimated €200bn a year (approximately 2% of GDP, almost twice the operational budget of the EU). The impact of congestion is worse in urban centres where 70% of transportation CO2 and particulate pollution is generated and is predicted to increase due to urban growth. All the metropolitan areas where the SETA use case is implemented are regarded as extreme congestion locations (two of them ranked within the most extreme of congestion locations across all of the EU cities). In such a complex environment disruption is the norm rather than the exception with very high costs in terms of lost business, environmental impact and lost time. The European Action Plan on Urban Mobility stresses that urban mobility planning is a priority to try to move our cities from a quasi total dependency on private cars to more sustainable transport modes, such as walking, cycling, public transport, and new patterns for car use and ownership.
SETA will provide effective solutions for the intelligent and sustainable mobility i.e. the smarter, greener and more efficient movement of people and goods. SETA will provide a radical change from transport as a series of separate modal journeys to an integrated, reactive, intelligent, mobility system. It will provide always-on, pervasive services to citizens and business, as well as decision makers to support safe, sustainable, effective, efficient and resilient mobility.
The activities of SETA are spread over 36 months and will be structured in 8 inter-related Work Packages (WP). SETA is a project focussed on development of core technologies for Big Data for mobility; a strong focus is also on the impact and deployment of the technology in the three cities. The workplan has two major milestones in month 6 for Requirement analysis and in month 15 when the first version of the technology will be deployed in the three cities. The deployment will last for the following 3 months until month 18. Then a second development cycle will last another 15 month until month 33. A final evaluation will start in month 30 and will last until the end of the project in month 36. This will allow long term testing in real world situation, allowing iterations of different versions of the technology and prepare for the follow-up exploitation in other cities. Throughout the whole runtime of the project, all partners will be involved in dissemination and exploitation activities and in project management.