Brussels, 5 October 2018

We are delighted to announce the official launch of the eagerly awaited ICT4CART project in Athens, Greece on September 2018.

ICT4CART is an EU-funded H2020 innovation action and consists of 21 partners from 9 EU countries, united in their vision to build a sustainable future for connected and automated vehicles.

The aim of ICT4CART, coordinated by the Institute of Communication & Computer Systems (ICCS), is to provide the ICT infrastructure to enable the transition towards road transport automation. ICT4CART is bringing together, adapting and improving technological advances from different industries, mainly the telecommunication, automotive and IT industries. The project adopts a hybrid communication approach where all the major wireless technologies, i.e. cellular, ITS G5 and LTE-V, are integrated under flexible “sliced” network architecture. This architecture will ensure performance and resilience for different groups of applications according to the needs of higher levels of automation. On top of that, a distributed IT environment for data aggregation and analytics will be implemented.

The result of this allows seamless integration and the exchange of data and services between all the different actors, encouraging third parties to develop, deliver and provide innovative services, thus creating new business opportunities. Cyber-security and data privacy aspects will be considered throughout the entire ICT infrastructure. In addition, innovative accurate localisation services, exploiting the cellular network and information from other sources, such as on-board sensors, especially in complex areas (e.g. urban), will be addressed. Standardisation and interoperability are of high interest within ICT4CART in order to ensure the project facilitates the transition to higher levels of automation. In this context, issues related to the frequency spectrum will be investigated, and with the organisation of relevant workshops the engagement of policy makers and public authorities will be ensured.

To achieve its objectives ICT4CART, instead of working in generic solutions with questionable impact, it builds on four specific high-value use cases (urban and highway) which will be demonstrated and validated under real-life conditions at the project test sites in Austria, Germany, Italy and across the Italian-Austrian border.

[The full press release is available for download here]

ICT4CART project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 768953.