Last November, Minister of Public Works, Íñigo de la Serna, presented the Transport and Infrastructure Innovation Plan 2017-2020, whose aim is to integrate and coordinate all of the innovation activities of the companies and institutions involved in the Public Works Group. With a planned investment of 50 million euros over a period of three years, the Plan starts in February 2018 with the launch of cross-cutting initiatives and projects throughout the Group so that ‘it will function as a collaborative group working within a network’, explained the minister.

Through the Plan, the Public Works Group is taking a major step forward in line with the European Commission’s H2020 programme, a financial instrument that seeks to ensure competitiveness through research and innovation. At the national level, the Plan is part of the government’s strategy on innovation, in which the Digital Agenda for Spain and the Spanish Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation play particularly significant roles.

Thanks to the National Smart Cities Plan developed by the State Secretary for the Information Society and Digital Agenda (SESIAD) in collaboration with Ineco, Spain is a pioneer in the development of smart cities, having established a number of guidelines on platform interoperability that have become an international benchmark. The platform ecosystem proposed in the Innovation Plan follows these guidelines, ensuring that the different transport initiatives complement and can be integrated into the advances made in smart cities. The result is a common strategy based on a solid model.

The Transport and Infrastructure Innovation Plan also uses BIM (Building Information Modelling) as a cross-cutting element for all of the initiatives, given the strategic role that it needs to play in the future of Spanish innovation (see report).

A cutting-edge transport system

Transport plays a key role in the overall development of societies and their economies. The way in which people and goods move through an area largely defines its social, economic and environmental fabric, which is why actions in transport and infrastructure are a vital part of any basic strategy in the ongoing process of expansion and modernisation of societies.

For this reason, the Plan is committed to putting technology at the service of the citizen, using innovation to make advances in safety, accessibility and sustainability. These advances need to be accompanied by greater economic and social profitability through an increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of public and private investment.

The Innovation Plan is structured around four main dimensions to achieve these objectives: digitisation, Internet of the future, intermodality and energy transformation. Supported by these dimensions, the initiatives proposed in the Plan represent a great boost to the consolidation of a safer, more sustainable and accessible cutting-edge transport system, which will keep Spain at the forefront of innovation in transport.

The aim of the plan is to put technology at the service of the citizen, using innovation to make progress in safety, accessibility and sustainability, advances that need to be accompanied by greater economic and social profitability through an increase in effectiveness and efficiency in public and private investment

Four major cornerstones and 70 initiatives underway

Drafted by Ineco, the Innovation Plan included participation by the heads of Adif, Aena, ENAIRE, CRIDA, Spanish Port System and Renfe. The opinions of other institutions, such as the Spanish Rail Research Laboratory (CEDEX), Spanish Maritime Safety and Rescue Agency (SASEMAR), the Ministry of Public Works and various private entities, were also taken into account. Four strategic cornerstones have been identified in the Plan: user experience; smart platforms; smart routes; and energy efficiency and sustainability. These cornerstones are structured in turn into 22 strategic lines, which have materialised into 70 initiatives.

User Experience is aimed at personalising the offering according to user preferences, providing them with products and services on demand. To that end, the concept of ‘Mobility as a Service’ and, in general, public-private collaboration models will be promoted. Several other initiatives will focus on the elimination of barriers, with the development and implementation of new booking, payment and validation systems focused on cybersecurity and fraud reduction.

Big Data will be the technological foundation that will enable personalisation of services and improved user experience.

The second cornerstone, Smart Platforms, is designed as a cross-cutting element that provides technological support to all of the initiatives in the Innovation Plan. Through these Platforms, information is collected and processed by the companies in the Public Works Group, improving efficiency, quality and security of the services offered.

The proposed platform ecosystem covers all modes of transport and is integrated with city platforms. The application of the BIM methodology in stations, airports and ports, and the promotion of the Single European Sky will play a special role in this ecosystem, which will also consider the inclusion of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Smart Routes are aimed at the digitisation of roads and railways, with the development of a framework for the implementation of connected and autonomous vehicles. One of the fundamental aspects will be the standardisation and regulation of vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure communications.

In addition, modelling and forecasting systems based on automatic learning and data science will be developed to enable smart transport planning and management. Dynamic traffic control, early recognition of congestion conditions on roads and dynamic driving management are some examples of the application of these developments.

The fourth cornerstone of the plan, Energy Efficiency and Sustainability, focuses on achieving transformation towards a sustainable and energy-efficient transport system in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rationalise the use of fossil fuels and facilitate the switch to new transport solutions. This line includes initiatives that promote the use of renewable energy generation systems, use of surplus energy for self-consumption or feeding back into the grid, promotion of electric vehicles and other vehicles with alternative energies in transport networks, among others. All of these measures seek to adapt transport elements and direct them towards more sustainable and effective models in order to enable Spain to position itself as a benchmark in the international sector.

Facilitating open innovation and encouraging start-up entrepreneurship through synergies with companies in the Public Works Group is also part of the initiatives of this fourth cornerstone.

The Plan aims to set up an innovative network that integrates and connects all sectors of society, encouraging investment in innovation by large companies and SMEs and actively involving universities, technology centres and entrepreneurs. Within this line, the creation of an ‘Innovation Rail Hub’ seeks to launch collaborative R&D projects that promote railway technology on an international scale.

ILLUSTRATION_JAVIER JUBERA

Experts in public transport innovation

To draft the Plan, Ineco’s Department of Cooperation and Innovation collaborated with a team of experts in innovation from the companies and institutions in the Public Works Group. Adif, Aena, ENAIRE, CRIDA, Spanish Port System and Renfe, together with other institutions such as Cedex and SASEMAR, worked with Ineco on the drafting of a common project:  “We set out a road map –says Rocío Viñas, Ineco’s deputy general director of Cooperation and Innovation– for the next three years with a strategy based on digitisation, the Internet of the future, intermodality and energy transformation.” For Rocío Viñas, analysis of the current situation of innovation projects “reflected the importance not only of sharing knowledge and creating synergies in the Public Works Group, but also of reinforcing collaboration with universities, startups and other companies, fostering and promoting our innovative culture inside and outside the EU.”

According to Javier Rodríguez Barea, Renfe’s manager of Transformation and Digital Innovation, the interesting aspect about this project is that “citizens are at the centre of the Innovation Plan, which acts a great prescriber of a new, more personalised, door-to-door mobility service in an interconnected and smart world, where technology and digitisation are put at the service of the companies in the Public Works Group in order to transform our value proposition towards society and improve user experience in our services.”

For Antonio Berrios, deputy director of Strategic Innovation at Adif, “one of the great contributions and challenges of this Innovation Plan is its cross-cutting vision within the Public Works Group, involving all companies making a technological leap to facilitate solutions that improve the capabilities of all of the modes of transport that travellers and goods units can use in their door-to-door mobility process.”

Along this same line, Juan Puertas Cabot, head of Aena’s Quality, Excellence and Innovation Division, adds that “effective innovation is always orientated towards known customers. The plan has combined the vision of the customer as a passenger on all modes of transport and as a citizen with their needs and expectations. This global vision is necessary to focus on effective innovation in global transport.” Juan Puertas points out that instead of highlighting a single initiative, he would stress the importance of including energy efficiency and sustainability as one of the main cornerstones: “It links with the whole strategy of the Plan, which puts society as a whole at the centre. I believe that a company of the future must necessarily be responsible and innovation is an essential tool to incorporate sustainability into transport processes.” In the case of Aena, within the framework of the Plan, the company is implementing the “digital transformation of the relationship with the passenger, where not only the necessary economic return is taken into account but also a focus on improvement of the passenger experience in the different steps of a customer’s journey at an airport. The firm commitment to this project has been reflected in 15 digital innovation initiatives that will be implemented during the next year.”

Thanks to ICT, transport services can be better designed and managed, addressing the real needs of citizens and interacting with them in real time and within an integrated and sustainable transport system that improves its economic and social profitability

Of the 70 initiatives, Jose Damián López, head of the Infrastructure Technology Department of the Spanish Port System, highlights the Intermodality without barriers (E3L4-2) initiative, because the project “will enable the planning and optimisation of services and infrastructures dedicated to intermodal transport, as well as simplifying administrative procedures through centralisation in the Goods Platform, providing one-stop services and monitoring the status of goods at the same time.” For José Damián López, the Plan also develops –in the field of R&D and innovation– the necessary relationships of trust between the companies in the Public Works Group, diversifying the risks and benefits associated with innovation, and increases “the value of expected results in all of the initiatives by adding to them the talent, knowledge and experience accumulated by the different organisations.”

Fernando Fernández Martín, head of ENAIRE’s European Convergence Division and responsible for the Innovation Plan, points out that it is difficult to choose from among the initiatives included in the Plan. While the Smart ATM initiative is key for ENAIRE (it addresses the evolution of the Spanish Air Traffic Management System to adapt it to the Single European Sky initiative), it would be unfair not to mention the Platform for the management of unmanned aerial vehicle traffic, because it faces the challenge posed by the arrival of unmanned aerial vehicles in our environment, on the one hand to encourage the development of new business models, while preventing this type of vehicle from posing risks for manned aircraft or citizens.

For José Miguel de Pablo, director of CRIDA⁽¹⁾, the Ministry’s Innovation Plan “will enable the promotion and consolidation of the incipient implementation of Big Data techniques at the service of ENAIRE, therefore, improving the efficiency of aerial navigation services. The computing power that is currently available and the increasing degree of maturity of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Machine Learning offer an alternative to the use of conventional techniques, allowing them to overcome their limitations.” The Plan, he adds, “opens up a new horizon of possibilities that can range from improvements in available information and reliability and streamlining of decision making to the automation of processes through the development of intelligent predictive models. And all with one sole purpose: to improve the service provided to the passenger.”

⁽¹⁾ CRIDA is the ATM R&D+innovation Reference Centre, A.I.E. formed by ENAIRE,  (66.66%), Ineco (16.67%) and the Polytechnic University  of Madrid (16.67 %).

The Maltese islands, with their extremely high population density (the highest in the EU and the eighth highest in the world), suffer congestion problems and traffic jams due to the extensive use of private passenger cars. The islands have no railway network, however maritime and aviation are important modes of transport both to and from mainland Europe and between the islands. Croatia, on the continent, is almost 180 times larger than Malta by area, but has a far lower population density. The country’s highways, roads and railway lines are currently undergoing a process of renovation and modernisation, as are river transport routes on large inland waterways such as the Danube and the Sava.

There are significant differences between Malta and Croatia in terms of their size and population; however both are currently in the process of planning the future growth of their transport networks, crucial for ensuring the proper working of their economies.

Malta and Croatia commissioned the services of Ineco experts, who prepared their respective National Transport Models as a crucial part of their medium and long-term planning strategies. In Malta, the National Master Plan was also developed

Both countries commissioned the services of Ineco experts, who prepared their respective National Transport Models to support their medium and long-term planning strategies. In Malta, the National Master Plan was also developed.

Using the leading software tools on the market (Aimsun, Legion, Visum, EMME, TransCAD, CUBE, WITNESS, HCS, ArcGIS and Viriato, among others), the transport modelling consultant team of the company develop models which depict reality and enable forecasts to be made, offering a clear, simple representation of complex realities. In this way, governments and transport authorities avail of a highly effective decision-making tool and are also able to compare the possible effects of these decisions in different scenarios and time horizons.

And there’s more. Models and simulations can take many different forms and be developed at different scales, from the effects of a new traffic light at a crossroads, to the demand analysis of a new highway or airport affecting an entire region or a country. They can also serve a range of purposes, from estimating traffic or demand to identifying weaknesses in the design of all kinds of infrastructure and public spaces (for example, spaces causing queues or congestion in stations or which prevent the correct operation of ground handling vehicles on airport runways); they can even be used to study the punctuality of a high-speed railway line.

These examples are taken from some of Ineco’s real assignments from recent years, which also include “tailor-made” models for specific projects.

Malta

On the Maltese archipelago, which is made up of five islands (Malta, Gozo, Comino, Cominotto and Filfla, of which only the first three are inhabited), the most widely used form of transport is the private car. The level of car ownership in the country, at 759 vehicles per thousand people, is one of the highest in the European Union, as are the density of its road network, at 762 kilometres per 100 km², and its population density, at 1,325 people per km², compared to the European average of 117. And all of this in a territory of just 316 km².

In such a unique context, the Maltese government established the islands’ need for short, medium and long-term transport planning, which would require thorough preliminary analysis. In 2014, the through transport authority, Transport Malta, the government ran a public tender to carry out the analysis. The winning bidder was the consortium made up of Ineco and the Italian company Systematica with the support of the Maltese firm ADI Associates, tasked with developing the strategic environmental assessment of the proposed measures.

The consortium’s first task was the development of a model, using the specialised CUBE software. The model served as the support for the National Strategy and the Transport Master Plan 2025. All modes of transport (land, maritime and aviation; public and private) were analysed in different scenarios, “do-nothing” and “do-minimum”, within a range of timeframes.  The reference points used were the years 2020 and 2025, with 2050 also being used to provide a long-term view; a comparison was drawn between the effects of various changes to the transport network and services. The model particularly illustrates the effects of the tested measures on congestion, modal split and the external impacts of traffic (accidents, GHGs and pollutant emissions).

The laborious process of creating the model has assisted in accurately quantifying the issues currently affecting the different modes of transport and has provided understanding of their causes. The results are shown in the Transport Master Plan 2025 and the medium and long-term objectives of the National Transport Strategy 2050. The Plan compares four possible scenarios: “do-nothing”, “do-minimum” and the “do-something” scenarios “1” and “2”. The “do-something” interventions consist in measures to restrain the use of private cars and increased support public transport and alternative modes (walking, cycling, etc.), with the first proposing moderate restraints and the second being stricter. The purpose of these scenarios is to assess the combined effect of various measures on Malta’s transport system as a whole.

For example, data analysis reveals that congestion, especially on the five radial roads connecting the capital Valletta with the rest of the island, would be most greatly reduced in “do-something 2” scenario, the most restrictive option.

Croacia

After joining the European Union in July 2013, Croatia undertook to review and update its long-term transport plan, which dated from 1999. To that end, an international consortium of five companies (PTV Group, leading the consortium, and PNZ, Ineco, Promel and the University of Zagreb) was commissioned to prepare the National Transport Model for the Republic of Croatia, intended to accompany and support the development of the new National Transport Strategy.

The Croatian government, through its Ministry of Maritime Affairs, Transport and Infrastructure, would therefore possess a valuable tool supporting medium and long-term decision-making, for planning connections to the rest of the European Union and domestic transport. Work began in 2014 and the model was developed over the following 24 months. Using 2013 as a base year and with three forecast time horizons (2020, 2030 and 2040), all modes of passenger and freight transport (road, rail, public road transprot, non-motorised transport, maritime, inland waterways and air transport) were analysed under different scenarios with and without implementation of transport strategies, measures and projects in the transport network.

A multi-modal 4-step model with generation, distribution, mode choice and assignmet on the network for passenger and freight traffic was developed. Different approaches for both passenger and freight  traffic were used to better represent and model their particular characteristics. The simulation was fed with data such as the costs and travel times for different modes, socioeconomic data, road network capacity and passenger behaviour information, obtained through a household survey carried out specifically for the project in 2015. The survey revealed, for example, that different parts of the country have different travel behaviour patterns. On account of this, the model incorporated a distinction between the Continental and Adriatic regions.

For freight transport, the complexity and heterogeneity of the sector were taken into account. For this reason, a highly disaggregated approach was used to calculate freight volumes, based on the origin and destination of homogenous commodity types. The main input data were the transport network data, socio-economic data, the national production of each commodity, import and export data and operational and cost parameters, among others; models were developed for both domestic and external freight flows (including import, export and transit).

Once the model was calibrated and validated, the different timeframes of 2020, 2030 and 2040 were simulated in two scenarios: “do-minimum” scenario to point out the bottlenecks and gaps in the transport system, and “do-something” scenario including the measures proposed in the National Transport Strategy. Obtaining results such as traffic flows in the different networks, the volume/capacity, indicators of accessibility to major cities, etc. made it possible to assess, formulate and prioritise the influence of different strategic measures for effective and sustainable traffic development on the country.