Innovating for greener mobility & a transport industry 4.0

Given the strong increase in travel — and the resulting environmental impacts — and the rise of ICT, mobility is evolving towards :

• More sustainable means, i.e. ever more respectful of their environment and users’ well-being (safety, user-friendliness and efficiency),
• Service-based solutions easing users’ increasingly multimodal journeys.

To support these changes, local authorities and cities must face challenges such as transport planning, multimodality, last-mile logistics and autonomous driving behaviour. The transport offering must be competitive and useful for transport operators, communities, and end users.

ALTEN, a world leader in engineering & IT services, has a key role to play in serving infrastructure managers, transport authorities, operators and industrial suppliers of railway systems in their quest for performance and quality.

ALTEN leads innovative research projects to support its clients in moving toward mobility solution ever more respectful of the environment (both in terms of CO₂ emissions and noise pollution), using  intelligent transport systems (ITS) and an overall digitalisation, from design to use.  To support  clients in tackling these changes as well as those driven by new digital technologies, ALTEN works with established transport businesses on research projects in two main areas:    

• The development of digital tools to ease mobility,
• Digital transformation to support the development of transport systems.  

In order to develop these mobility support tools, ALTEN has agreed upon a strategic partnership with HERE Technologies, the world’s leading location data and platform company.

Digital tools to ease the mobility of goods and people

For local authorities, mobility and urban planning: Keeping traffic flows under control through smart infrastructure management and their cooperation with smart and connected transport systems requires traffic simulation means. Digital twins should help local authorities to assess the impact of changes in transport infrastructure, intermodal strategies, and traffic management.

For users and multimodal mobility: experimentation on intermodal management to adapt the offering to changes in mobility flows and to better distribute users among all the means of transport while promoting green mobility through appropriate modal shift.

For freight transport and last-mile delivery: multi-criteria optimisation of freight transport logistics flows that are more respectful in their environmental impact in an end-to-end approach, with a specific focus on last-mile delivery.  

Multi-modal transport:
the “Effective Traffic Management” project  

The ALTEN Lab in Paris is leading the “Effective Traffic Management” project to create a Smart Mobility digital twin of an area using the SUMO open source simulator, which allows to import geolocation data (from Here or Open Street Map), to model traffic flows in the city using counting data, to integrate public transport and soft mobility flows, to replicate  traffic light scheduling, and to implement  environmental impact measurement models, including CO₂ and noise pollution.

This digital twin can benefit to:

Municipal authorities: to assess the impact of a change in infrastructure such as a modification of the road network or the development of a new site, to optimise the city’s infrastructure, including synchronisation of traffic lights, road traffic, and the multimodal mobility of its users in a given area, and to anticipate difficulties during exceptional events, such as sporting or cultural events, social events, and the scheduled closure of public roads.

Users and urban mobility: promote multimodal transport and a shift to public transport and soft mobility and guarantee a “door-to-door” journey time.

Digital transformation: new horizons for the transport industry and mobility

From industry to finance, new digital technologies are upending processes throughout the product lifecycle and facilitating the convergence of two previously separate worlds: IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operation Technology). This convergence brings improvements in various fields such as prescriptive maintenance as well as the design of ever more efficient digital twins of products, factories, and cities. ALTEN’s teams innovate along the entire value chain to improve new products’ development time while making industrial processes more efficient.

ECO-DESIGN

The “EcoIoT4.0 – Eco-design of an intelligent sensor for predictive maintenance” project – ALTEN, winner of the ADEME 2022 call for projects

This ALTEN project, in partnership with SIEMENS DI CS and Greenspector, proposes the implementation of a measurement and eco-design tool for a global hardware and software solution and experiments with it to eco-design a smart sensor to carry out predictive maintenance.   This eco-design knowledge is key within the transport industry as we move toward smart mobility based on electric or hydrogen propulsion, where every watt consumed equals miles driven.  

5G, accelerating mobility 4.0  

ALTEN has partnered with Bouygues Telecom Entreprises and Siemens Customer Services Digital Industries to help its customers achieve very high-speed digital continuity for increasingly critical IT/OT.   This level of criticality and the related  quality of service will help the transport industry to make the transition to:  

• 4.0: production flexibility, factory resilience to crises, prescriptive maintenance in technical centres for rolling stock maintenance
• More secure modes of transport: connected level crossings, new-generation autonomous vehicles, smart signalling that responds to its environment, smart cameras in transport networks 
• Smart multimodal hyper-vision: connected objects for future cities, distributed intelligence across the different modes of transport, new services related to MaaS