The University of Groningen presents an Innovation Agenda Smart Mobility

The University of Groningen presents the 'Smart Mobility' innovation agenda, which contains the joint research plans of around 40 researchers from 9 faculties. The aim is to contribute, together with the business community, non-profit organisations and government institutions, to the transition to a more sustainable and efficient mobility of goods and people in both urban areas and the surrounding regions.

The UG is focusing on large-scale cooperation between various disciplines. The development of new mobility systems requires not only the development of new technologies, but also the integration of these technologies into existing organisations and environments or the development of the environment to make it suitable for the application of new technologies. All this taking into account current and future legal frameworks, ethical values and limitations and opportunities in the field of human behaviour.

For example, if you want to keep vehicles running on fossil fuels from entering a city centre, what does this require? It requires a technological transition to different types of sustainable vehicles, a change in the environment to accommodate these types of vehicles, other organisational models that may combine passenger transport and freight transport, new legislation and regulations or adaptation of existing frameworks, different thinking and behavioral frameworks. taking into account different stakeholders. In short, a myriad of knowledge and innovation that should actually be developed at the same time.

Four themes

That is why the researchers involved have joined forces and developed four themes within which research will be tackled in the coming period:

• Open and fully connected mobility and logistics networks in which concepts of the sharing economy are being applied
• Management of smart mobility networks
• Organisational and revenue models
• Smart solutions

With the presentation of this innovation agenda, the researchers also formulate an explicit invitation to external partners to work together in the development of new concepts to jointly take the step towards more sustainable mobility of freight and people. For more information, contact the team of Industry Relations at industryrelations@rug.nl.

The innovation agenda can be downloaded via this link.