On 29-30 November 2017 was held the international conference INTSYS 2017 – “Intelligent Transport Systems – From research and development to the market uptake”, organised by ERAdiate. The event took place in Hyvinkää, Finland, as a co-located scientific event of the SmartCity 360˚ Summit and was organised in cooperation with the European Alliance for Innovation (EAI), with the sponsorship of two companies (Orange Slovensko, a.s, and Siemens, s.r.o.) and one non-profit organisation (Research Institute of Posts and Telecommunications (VUS)). The conference gathered 29 participants (including 5 researchers from UNIZA, for whom ERAdiate covered the registration fee thanks to the support from the aforementioned sponsors), from 11 European countries and 4 non-EU countries, covering diverse stakeholders notably from academia, public and private sectors, European institutions and associations.
Thanks to the strong involvement of the ERAdiate team, in particular with the ERA Chair Holder as General Chair, Dr. Ghadir Pourhashem and Dr. Giuseppe Lugano as Technical Programme Committee (TPC) Chair and TPC Co-Chair respectively, INTSYS 2017 had a rich and focused technical programme with 4 keynote speeches, 4 invited talks, a special ERAdiate session “From travel time and cost savings to value of mobility” and 31 accepted research papers (8 of which have been submitted by authors from Asia and Africa and 5 by UNIZA).
We made it a priority to have a good range of papers, but also a diverse and balanced speaker set on stage, both in terms of background and gender. INTSYS 2017 boasted four outstanding keynote speakers. We were fortunate to have a presentation from Professor emeritus Dr. Lorna Uden (UK) on the design of an effective Intelligent Transport System which meets the needs and values of different users. Mr. Martin Russ, Managing Director of AustriaTech, introduced an inspiring initiative – the Austrian Urban Mobility Labs (UML). Dr. Floridea Di Ciommo from cambiaMO in Spain demonstrated how relevant it is to combine ITS data analysis with people’s needs, preferences and choices. Last, but not least, Dr. Uwe Reiter from PTV in Germany guided the participants through tools, techniques and methods for future planning of transport systems and services.
In the Industrial track, we very happy to have four sound speakers: Mr. Jarkko Jaakkola from MaaS Global in Finland; Dr. Martin Nemčik from the Škoda company in the Czech Republic; Mr. Harri Paloheimo from CoReorient in Finland; and Ms. Piia Karjalainen, Senior Manager from MaaS Alliance/ERTICO – ITS Europe. It was clear that several innovative and potentially disruptive trends are occurring in the transport and mobility sector. Apart from technological and business innovations such as the ones presented by Škoda or the MaaS Global offer, one of the topics that emerged concerns the controversial developments of the “sharing economy”, which is still unregulated. This may limit the diffusion of innovative transport services and mobility solutions. In this respect, the CoReorient approach underlined the importance of co-creation of value with the involvement of the public sector, private companies, civil society, and local communities.
ERAdiate is currently working on the INTSYS proceedings, which will be published in 2018 with Springer.