TRA competition for transport innovation

The 345 TRA is calling for applicants for its dual transport innovation competition. The TRA Visions 2018 competition invites young and senior researchers from all over Europe to submit innovative transport concepts to www.travisions.eu. The two European-funded TRA Visions 2018 competitions, one for young researchers and the second for senior researchers, are now open to applicants. Young and senior researchers throughout Europe are invited to submit innovative concepts on future transport matters to develop efficient and sustainable transport and mobility of people and goods. Ever more people and goods are moving around the world in constantly shorter timeframes. This makes innovative transport solutions an important necessity. What could future transport look like? How can existing infrastructure cope with the rising strain, be it road, rail, waterborne or cross-modal transport systems? Which are efficient and sustainable solutions to the arising questions on mobility issues?

For the young researcher competition the deadline for a first short abstract is 30th June 2017. Following this, participants are requested to develop and submit their full idea by 30th October 2017 where they need to provide a report, a short presentation and a project poster accompanied by an optional short video.

Senior researchers can enter their competition either by submission of a technical paper/abstract to the TRA 2018 conference website (www.traconference.eu) or by direct submission of a recently published technical paper to the TRA Visions 2018 website (www.travisions.eu). To be eligible, a paper must be technical in nature and relate to EU-funded transport research. The submission phase will be followed by an Evaluation of Ideas period during which a judging panel comprising experts from universities, research institutes and industry will determine the top three concepts for each transport mode.

The final winners of the competitions will be announced during a prestigious award ceremony at the Transport Research Arena (TRA) Conference 2018 in Vienna on 16-19th April 2018. The concepts must be submitted under one of the TRA2018 Conference topics. These include: environment and energy efficiency; advanced propulsion systems; smart urban mobility and logistics; transport infrastructure; connected and automated transport; digital technologies for transport; safe, secure and resilient transport systems; human dimension in transport; socio-economics, innovation and policy.

TRA Visions is an initiative funded by the European Commission and takes place every two years. It awards a prize for innovative concepts for transport solutions to both young researchers and senior ones in European-funded projects throughout Europe. The project consortium members responsible for organising the competition are: the Institute for Automotive Engineering (ika) of RWTH Aachen University; the Foundation WEGEMT - A European Association of Universities in Marine Technology and Related Sciences (WEGEMT); BALance Technology Consulting; Politecnico di Torino (POLITO); Newcastle University (UNEW); FEHRL; the Austria Institute of Technology (AIT) and University College London (UCL).

The award ceremony takes place during the TRA conference, which is held every two years and aims at getting science, research and industry closer together and pointing out challenges and opportunities they can efficiently face together in order to create an efficient and sustainable mobility of people and goods.