Completed Projects
Leveraging Big Data to Manage Transport Operations
Funding Agency
The LeMO project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 770038.
Project Summary
Big Data at its core is precisely the collection of enormous amounts of data from hundreds of sources such as: operation systems, weather reports, customer interactions, social media, vehicle diagnostics, mobile devices, and online activity. Recent developments in the quantity, complexity and availability of data collected from and about transport, together with advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), present new opportunities to create more efficient and smarter transport systems for both people and freight. Furthermore, “opening up” data in transport by making it more widely available and linking it to data from other sectors, is also a fundamental part of the European strategy concerned with improving transparency and encouraging economic growth. Big Data has opened a wide spectrum of opportunities in the field of transport research. Several challenges will constitute opportunities for researchers (as well as the industry) in the foreseeable future. In observing the recent growing interest in the application of Big Data within transport science as well as the widened scope of its applications; it is evident that most of the challenges have yet to be addressed.
Leveraging Big Data to Manage Transport Operations (LeMO) project addressed these issues by investigating the implications of the utilising Big Data to enhance the economic sustainability and competitiveness of the European transport sector. The project consortium studied and analysed Big Data in the European transport sector in particular with respect to five transport dimensions: mode, sector, technology, policy and evaluation. LeMO accomplished this by conducting a series of case studies, which were pre-cursors to providing recommendations on the prerequisites of effective Big Data implementation in the transport field. Pertinent methodological, technological, governmental, and institutional issues were investigated in seven case studies, which in turn contributed to evidence-based decision making. These case studies were supplemented with a horizontal analysis in order to identify the barriers and limitations of the transportation system to exploit Big Data opportunities. In consultation with an Advisory and Reference Group (ARG), and expert stakeholders, LeMO devised a research and policy roadmap which sets out the necessary incremental steps towards data openness and sharing to make transport safer, more efficient and more sustainable. Notably, LeMO brought crucial issues linked to privacy, data security and legal aspects to the forefront, paving the way for a future legal framework for the collection and exploitation of Big Data in transport.
Resilient Europe and Societies by Innovating Local Communities
Funding Agency
The RESILOC project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 833671.
Project Summary
The overall goal of RESILOC is to identify new strategies for improving on the processes of preparedness of local communities against any kind of hazards, either planned or unplanned. The project aims at bringing together the validity and experience of local communities and the strategies and commitment of national and supra-national actors to achieve a tangible impact on the way resilience is understood and increased in local communities. Therefore a holistic framework of studies, methods and software instruments will be developed, that combines the physical with the less tangible aspects associated with human behavior that applies at the community scale.
The study-oriented section of the framework will move from a thorough collection and analysis of literature and stories from the many approaches to resilience adopted all over the World. The results of the studies will lead to the definition of a set of new methods and strategies where the assessment of the resilience indicators of a community will be performed together with simulations on the “what-if” certain measures are taken. These studies and methods will serve for designing and implementing two software instruments:
The RESILOC inventory, a comprehensive, live, structure for collecting, classifying and using information on cities and local communities, implemented as a Software as a Service (SaaS).
The RESILOC Cloud-based platform for assessing and calculating the resilience indicators of a city or a community, for developing localised strategies and verifying their impacts on the resilience of the community. The Cloud platform, a combination of SaaS and PaaS, includes the inventory as its repository.
The project will make use of built solutions in four field trials and includes a high-profile communication plan, heavily based on Social Media platforms.
Ubiquitous Data-Driven Urban Mobility
Funding Agency
This project received funding from the Research Council of Norway (RCN)
Funding Agency
This project received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 608352.
High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications
Funding Agency
This COST Action supported by the EU Framework Programme Horizon 2020.
Funding Agency
This project received funding from the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education (Diku) through INTPART programme.
Project Summary
Urban mobility in most cities of the developed world is changing. Changes in urban mobility no longer follow traditional patterns. Smartphone applications now support peoples' travel decisions as they move through the city, opening up possibilities for smarter mobility services that respond flexibly to user needs. New technologies and business models are emerging to solve the mobility challenge. Aiming to enable a vision for future mobility, Ubiquitous Data-Driven Urban Mobility (UBIMOB) project will develop an adaptive and context sensitive mobility solution (dashboard), which on one hand helps citizens to make smart decisions taking their personal need into account and on the other hand helping service providers and operators to reach equilibrium of mobility services, supply and demand, by smarter resource planning and matchmaking.
Urban mobility generates huge amounts of data through sensors, traffic cameras, as well as asynchronous user-generated information, synchronous user-generated data, historic databases and data from mobility companies in real-time. If properly analysed and interlinked, these data can be utilized to understand, optimise and manage mobility and make it more efficient, sustainable and smart.
The project has the potential to impact the everyday lives of citizens, their health and the environment with huge financial and social impact.
UBIMOB solution will be evaluated rigorously by people, business and decision makers in 3 cities in Norway. In first phase, UBIMOB partners will explore and assess the technical feasibility, needs of cities and commercial potential of an innovation that the consortium wants to exploit.
The UBIMOB consortium consists of 5 national partners and 2 international partners with complementary expertise covering all aspects of the project.
Emergency Management in Social Media Generation
The overall objective of EmerGent is to understand the positive and negative impact of social media in emergencies in order to:
enhance the safety and security of citizens before, during and after emergencies,
strengthen the role of European companies supplying services and products related to EmerGent results.
Wherever emergencies or crises occur, ad-hoc communities are built through existing social media channels. These communities are often not connected at all or perhaps are weakly to the emergency management services. Systematic research project concerning the effective identification and integration of valuable and reliable information from social media into emergency management processes is needed.
A strongly research-oriented methodology is created to achieve five objectives:
Analyse the impact that social media can have on citizens and emergency management in all its phases.
Show the positive impact that gathering, qualifying, mining and routing information from social media can have on the management of emergencies.
Identify the requirements for implementing and evaluating novel methods and tools for integrating social media into emergency management.
Provide professionals and the public with guidelines for social media use in emergencies.
Clarify the potential for exploitation of social media in emergencies.
The Big Data era poses a critically difficult challenge and striking development opportunities in High-Performance Computing (HPC): how to efficiently turn massively large data into valuable information and meaningful knowledge. Computationally effective HPC is required in a rapidly-increasing number of data-intensive domains, such as Life and Physical Sciences, and Socio-economical Systems.
Modelling and Simulation (MS) offer suitable abstractions to manage the complexity of analysing Big Data in various scientific and engineering domains. Unfortunately, Big Data problems are not always easily amenable to efficient MS over HPC. Also, MS communities may lack the detailed expertise required to exploit the full potential of HPC solutions, and HPC architects may not be fully aware of specific MS requirements.
Therefore, there is an urgent need for European co-ordination to facilitate interactions among data intensive MS and HPC experts, ensuring that the field, which is strategic and of long-standing interest in Europe, develops efficiently - from academic research to industrial practice. This Action will provide the integration to foster a novel, coordinated Big Data endeavour supported by HPC. It will strongly support information exchange, synergy and coordination of activities among leading European research groups and top global partner institutions, and will promote European software industry competitiveness.
Transnational Partnership for Excellent Research and Education in Big Data and Emergency Management
Project Summary
The utility and potential of big data for emergency management is growing but integration of big data into existing workflows and practices is far from seamless. To fulfill the potential benefits of big data for emergency management, the BDEM project shares best practices among the project partners in order to build and strengthen research and training that leverages big data and data analytics to transform emergency management for citizens and for society at-large. This resulted in a more consistent, enhanced and professionalised level of research and education in the domain in Norway. The BDEM research and education network is coordinated by Vestlandsforsking. In cooperation with university partners in Norway, USA and Japan, it concentrated on exploring issues related to big data and emergency management. BDEM developed innovative curricula on in the field as a research and innovation space where national academics and students work with international partners to co-create new knowledge and practices to address real world emergency management challenges.