The objective of SORTEDMOBILITY is to develop and assess concepts, models and algorithms to enable self-organizing railway operations, whereby intelligent trains autonomously participate in the traffic management. The aim is to improve flexibility, capacity and resilience of the railway system as a mobility backbone, to accomplish an efficient and demand-aware urban and interurban rail mobility growth. The assessment will be performed thanks to a holistic integrated approach. Traffic simulation based on real data will provide the experimental proof-of-concept validating the achievement of TRL3. This objective addresses three major evolution challenges emerging in the urban and interurban public transport system: i) guaranteeing a high level of service (e.g., frequent, reliable, demand-responsive, resilient) in larger and larger networks, ii) ensuring overall accessibility gains for the heterogeneous population of users in their daily travel patterns within a multi-modal environment; iii) achieving efficiency and fairness in a system involving multiple actors operating in a competitive market. These challenges are becoming more and more critical in the current context of urban development. Indeed, the on-going mobility revolution encompasses the appearance of new operational settings, with personal and flexible new transport modes bringing higher connectivity and evolving dynamics to travellers' decisions. This has so far mostly resulted in a non-ecological and non-efficient increase of car traffic flows in the city. Today, public transport networks, and railways in particular, are managed in a centralized way. The traditional decision-making process can hardly cope with the three pointed-out evolution challenges. Intuitively, instead, a self-organizing approach could be able to do so. First, it could efficiently scale up to large networks. Second, it could satisfy the need for transport customization: it could leave aside the very concept of rigid timetabling and exploit the flexibility of self-organization to respond to multi-modality needs in terms of synchronization, accessibility discrepancies across heterogeneous travelers, or modal substitution in case of service performance changes due, e.g., to disruptions. Third, it could simplify and encourage cooperation and local competition in a dynamic context. Inspired from natural systems, as bird flocks or ant colonies, the innovation that SORTEDMOBILITY will propose is a self-organization approach that relies on the ability of multiple intelligent agents—i.e., trains—to decide their route and schedule based on local knowledge of demand and network conditions, and to interact with neighbor agents to negotiate and find a consensus on the best shared solution. The expected results of SORTEDMOBILITY will be the proposal and assessment of a holistic integrated approach. It will join novel algorithms for self-organizing operations based on new operational principles, innovative models to capture passenger demand evolution and enhanced microscopic mobility simulation. These algorithms and models will exploit state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence techniques, in particular in the fields of swarm intelligence and machine learning. SORTEDMOBILITY will also produce ad hoc KPIs suitable to assess such a holistic approach. The analysis of the simulated traffic evolution and its impact on passengers will result in a set of guidelines and recommendations for infrastructure managers, system manufacturers and regulatory bodies to support future system specifications. The analysis and assessment will be carried out on three case studies selected and supplied by European railway infrastructure managers to cover a large spectrum of urban public transport configurations, in Denmark, Italy and France.

The TANDEM project is targeting the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Doctoral Networks / Joint Doctorates 2023 call for proposals, with the objective of recruiting and training 15 Doctoral Candidates (DC) and awarding them with joint doctoral degrees from two of the network partners. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are some of the key enabling technologies of the 21st century, as they are now the core components of a wide range of technical systems ranging from daily consumer products like smartphones to biomedical applications and the space industry. Yet, in order to handle, manipulate and control ultra-small volumes of fluid with high precision, advanced MEMS devices still need to be developed, as many of the phenomena on the macroscopic length scales do not apply on the microscopic length scales of microfluidic devices. This is why the TANDEM project aims to address engineering thermodynamics issues directly linked to miniaturisation in order to develop innovative and complex microsystems with applications in the fields of health, energy and environment. The development of these new microsystems is in the continuity of the research activities developed in 2 former ITN projects MIGRATE and GASMEMS, in which real advances have been made in understanding gas flows with heat transfer in MEMS, mainly with fundamental knowledge, and first steps have been taken towards miniaturised applications. The scientific objective of TANDEM is now to improve knowledge on fluid and heat transport in the specific context of mechanical, biological and chemical engineering thermodynamics. The aim is to design a new generation of complex microsystems and demonstrate that they are working, thus integrating the previous bricks and new ones together in given applications to develop demonstrators in the lab and relevant environment (TRL4-5). To achieve this objective, experimental and numerical studies will be conducted to solve flow and heat transfer problems in the context of these complex microsystems, yet many different challenges, identified from the state-of-the-art analysis, need to be addressed. In particular, the high scientific and technological potential of thermal machines at the microscale is currently underexploited in Europe, essentially due to a compartmentalisation of skills. The main goal of the TANDEM network is to overcome these barriers and reinforce collaborations and dialogue by elaborating a common language, through each step from the scientific fundamentals to applications. The different teams involved in the TANDEM consortium have developed an expertise in various disciplines and some of them have already collaborated in GASMEMS and MIGRATE or in other bilateral research projects. Interdisciplinarity will be at the core of the TANDEM project through the co-supervision of all the PhD students, and the overall organisation of the TANDEM project will reinforce this interdisciplinary work. The objective is to propose a new and innovative doctoral programme not yet correctly covered by the existing doctoral schools/programmes in Europe. A new generation of microsystems will be designed based on innovative technologies involving physical phenomena at microscale, which have so far been poorly implemented, and will tackle the current constraints of low cost, transportability, and low energy consumption. Special attention will be paid to the sustainability and circularity of the process. Given the urgency of the current health, energy and climate crises, the TANDEM project and consortium have the ability to provide concrete tools and solutions to today’s critical societal challenges.

The Agricultural Water Innovations in the Tropics (AgWIT) partnership will test key management innovations to reduce impacts of agriculture on water resources, improve climate change resiliency and enhance freshwater security. We will evaluate water and carbon use efficiencies for a range of agricultural production systems under current and alternative management scenarios. We will build on a unique network of tropical agricultural water observatories that integrates eddy covariance towers in Brazil and Costa Rica using infrastructure recently established by two projects funded through the Freshwater Security initiative of the Belmont Forum. Optical and thermal monitoring of ecophysiological indicators of plant water stress at multiple scales will be added to the eddy covariance monitoring systems using field-portable analysers, tower-based sensors, sensors integrated with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and data obtained via satellite remote sensing. We will also conduct detailed hydrological and isotopic measurements of these soil-plant-water systems in response to soil and water management strategies._x000D_ _x000D_ We will test the ability of biochar (charcoal derived from waste biomass via pyrolysis) in tropical cropping systems to increase water use efficiencies (from increased soil water storage resulting from biochar additions), increase soil carbon sequestration (through soil application of biochar which has a high carbon content), and improve the water quality of soil leachate (resulting from the filtering effect of biochar, which has very high reactive surface area and exchange capacity). To do this, AgWIT will (i) measure agricultural carbon and water fluxes, crop yields and plant water stress over more than 20 crop cycles in both rainfed and irrigated agricultural systems, (ii) determine using isotopes what portion of water (rainfall and/or irrigation) is used by crops, lost by soil evaporation and percolated beyond the root zone, and (iii) evaluate optimal biochar-based soil treatments to improve crop water use efficiencies._x000D_ _x000D_ Benchmarking volumetric water, carbon and land footprints under different management strategies will be accompanied by AgWIT social scientist stakeholder group consultations in Brazil and Costa Rica. This will allow evaluation of alternative decision pathways to improve agricultural water management, and reduce vulnerability to climate-change impacts within the hydro-social system. We have strong, on-going relationships with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), water management agencies and producer groups in both study regions. These relationships will help to structure strategies for specific decisions concerned with freshwater management choices through structured decision making workshops involving local stakeholders and technical specialists. Scenarios identified by stakeholder groups and water managers will be incorporated into hydrological modelling activities, which will also be used to model biochar impacts at field and landscape scales under realistic management scenarios._x000D_ _x000D_ In sum, AgWIT will develop a globally unique data set of crop responses to biochar amendments, irrigation practices and rainfall patterns. Volumetric water, carbon, land and fertilizer footprints under alternative management scenarios relative to current crop benchmarks are important to producers to aid in water management decision-making. It is also important for the EU because water, carbon, and other resources used in the production of imported agricultural products are indirectly allocated to EU’s consumption. Water and other footprint information will be shared with major life cycle analyses databases in support of the EU’s “single market for green products” initiative.

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) is the most important viral disease in pigs worldwide. Failure of vaccination and the emergence of highly virulent strains, the so-called High Fever Disease (HFD) PRRSV strains, cause huge economical losses to pig industry and is a big issue in animal welfare. HFD PRRSV strains of genotype II (American) emerged in 2006 in Asia. At present, the situation is there out of hand. These HFD PRRSV II strains pose a long distance threat to Europe. However, at the same time HFD PRRSV strains of type I (European, subtype 3 (Lena-like)) were also discovered in Eastern Europe (Belarus). This year, more virulent/pathogenic PRRSV I subtype 1 strains emerged in Western Europe, causing fever for one week and respiratory problems. Type I HFD PRRSV strains replicate to higher levels (x10-100) than the traditional PRRSV strains by infecting more subtypes of monocytic cells (use of new receptors), suppress heavily the antimicrobial defence and immune responses and cause respiratory problems and mortality. Vaccination against these strains with commercial attenuated and inactivated vaccines sometimes lead to an aggravation of the disease instead of protection. Type I HFD strains are menacing now the whole European pig industry. This brings HFD PRRS in the group of viral diseases that cannot be fully controlled by the available vaccines. Therefore, HFD PRRS should be prioritized in surveillance (diagnosis) and search for safe and efficacious vaccines. In the present project proposal, a group of five European PRRS experts that are already cooperating in a EU PRRS project (2009-2014) will join forces again to control HFD PRRS in Europe. By studying the pathogenesis, it will be examined what the mechanisms are of (i) the higher replication power of HFD PRRSV (target cells, new receptors), (ii) the immunosuppression and (iii) the immunity-dependent enhancement of virus replication. Based on the results new vaccines (inactivated/vector/attenuated) will be designed, developed and tested. In parallel, PRRS surveillance will be launched, in order to trace HFD PRRSV and to take the correct actions, whenever this virus causes a catastrophic epidemic in Western Europe.