Vehicles become more and more complex with the advances in the automated vehicle technology. The deployment of automated vehicle (AV) will take place step by step as the level of vehicle’s autonomy and the complexity of in its environment increases, moving from highway to urban or rural areas. During this transition period, the AV will become a social agent taking decisions to regulate its interactions with other vehicles, vulnerable road users, and static objects in its environment in a mixed traffic. An AV will find itself in unavoidable collision conditions that oblige the vehicle to make real time decisions of risk distribution in ethical dilemma involving high uncertainty. The ethical principles of an AV thus become indispensable to take into account from the early stages of design. The global objective of the AVEthics project is to produce recommendations for a societally acceptable ethics policy for an AV in ethical dilemma situations. We adopt a multidisciplinary approach to realize our objective, bringing together experts from philosophy, artificial intelligence and robotics, and social psychology. The first aim is to define and specify the kind of (artificial) ethics that can be applied to the artificial intelligence of an AV, including its moral principles, values and weighing rules and their position with respect to human ethics and ontology. The second aim is to model the properties of an artificial ethics numerically in order to test the interactions of an AV with other road users in dilemma situations. The third aim is to evaluate the social acceptability of the ethics principals proposed for an AV applied to simulated use cases. In line with these goals, the expected outcomes of the AVEthics project are 1) an initial proposition of ethical principles for an AV, 2) a numerical modelling interface to apply these ethical principles to different use cases, and 3) end user’s acceptability judgments of the proposed ethical principles and the following action plans. The outcomes of the project are expected to improve the operational safety design of an AV and render it acceptable for the end-user and the stakeholders of the mobility system.

The proposed project “Coherent Support for Mobility.E Strategy” (COSMOS) aims at supporting the ECSEL Lighthouse Initiative Mobility.E in its endeavour to accelerate the deployment of clean and automated road mobility solutions and the realisation of the associated socio-economic benefits. For this purpose, the COSMOS project will assist the Lighthouse Initiative Advisory Service (LIASE) in the continuous identification and prioritisation of research topics and the subsequent translation into an action plan to support roadmap implementation. It will map the Mobility.E ecosystem by comparing the Strategic Research Agendas of ECSEL and of the European Technology Platforms AENEAS, EPoSS and ARTEMIS-IA involved therein with those of stakeholders further down the value chain, such as ERTRAC, EUCAR, CLEPA, and EATA regarding complementarity and coherence, and it will analyse the implementation of these roadmaps into funded projects. This approach shall enable the identification of white spots and gaps and it will reveal the potentials for bridging these with a dedicated implementation plan. This content-related work will be enabled by a set of effective network support measures in terms of stakeholder engagement and collaboration, events and workshops as well as dissemination building an extensive Stakeholder Circle. One of the visible activities supported by COSMOS will be continuation and further development of the ECA 2030 networking events series. The contractual and associated partners of COSMOS are representing the Mobility.E lighthouse projects, the LIASE and the governing board of ECSEL, the editorial team of the “Transport and Smart Mobility” chapter of the ECSEL Joint SRA and further relevant stakeholders. By working together in a coherent manner in processes for strategy development and network support they form a strong backbone of the community to be built for the Mobility.E Lighthouse of ECSEL.

Automation in passenger cars is constantly increasing. In order to leverage the introduction of highly automated vehicles to the market and to fully exploit the automation’s potential to improve traffic safety and efficiency the careful design of the human-machine interaction is of utmost importance. Human drivers will remain part of the system for a long time. The vision of AutoMate is a novel driver-automation interaction and cooperation concept to ensure that (highly) automated driving systems will reach their full potential and can be commercially exploited. This concept is based on viewing and designing the automation as the driver’s transparent and comprehensible cooperative companion or teammate. Driver and automation are regarded as members of one team that understand and support each other in pursuing cooperatively the goal of driving safely, efficiently and comfortably from A to B. Only such kind of systems can enhance safety by using the strength of both the automation and human driver in a dynamic way. These systems will be trusted and accepted, which is inevitable for drivers to be willing to buy and use such systems appropriately. The top-level objective of AutoMate is to develop, demonstrate and evaluate the “TeamMate Car” concept as a major enabler of highly automated vehicles. In order to realize the concept we will perform research and develop innovations for 7 technical Enablers: (1) Sensor and Communication Platform, (2) Probabilistic Driver Modelling and Learning; (3) Probabilistic Vehicle and Situation Modelling; (4) Adaptive Driving Manoeuvre Planning, Execution and Learning; (5) Online Risk Assessment; (6) TeamMate HMI; and (7) TeamMate System Architecture. The corresponding innovations will be integrated und implemented on several car simulators and real vehicles to evaluate and demonstrate the project progress and results in real-life traffic conditions.

Transit has a crucial role in the economics and the society of urban conurbations. To drive its evolution toward environmental sustainability and better user-centric performance, we envision optimally integrating new (Auto- mated) Mobility on Demand and classic Fixed Route Transit. This calls for a deep re-disign of transit. The goal of MuTAS (Latin form of "to mutate") is to provide a general and efficient methodology to guide such a re-design. Our interdisciplinary approach combines Transportation Science, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. We jointly design the routes and the frequencies of Fixed-Route Transit and decide in which regions and time of the days Mobility on Demand will operate, as well as its fleet size.

EEA4CCAM proposes in-vehicle electronic control architectures for Connected, Cooperative, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) applications, ensuring safe and cyber-secure deployment across diverse operating conditions. By integrating hardware and software co-design, EEA4CCAM enables smart data flows and secure operation through a centralized, upgradable architecture. The project aims to empower the safe and cyber-secure deployment of CCAM solutions through a novel, centralized, and upgradable in-vehicle electronic control architecture. This will be achieved by performing a paradigm shift in in-vehicle electronic control architectures, developing a centralized, upgradable, and open-source design that integrates HW and SW co-design, enables smart data flows, and ensures safe and cyber-secure operation. The project will foster international cooperation, harmonization, and standardization, promoting open-source interfaces and layouts, and facilitating the development and integration of CCAM applications through exemplarily deployment and validation methods. Five key objectives will be achieved: developing a new, centralized design; exemplarily deploying level 4 automation use cases; enabling safe and cyber-secure operation through system agility and distributed intelligence; realizing a paradigm shift to integrated, resource-efficient architectures; and setting up international cooperation for harmonized electronic control architecture layouts, promoting open-source interfaces and layouts. By achieving these objectives, EEA4CCAM will lay the foundation for the software-defined-vehicle, enabling the widespread adoption of CCAM applications and paving the way for a safer, more efficient, and more connected transportation system.