General meeting of the eMobility Technology Platform

In mid-September 2010, the general meeting of the eMobility Technology Platform was held in Telekom Italia's Future Center in Venice. The participants included representatives from universities (e.g. Porto, Berlin, Milano, Paris), industry (e.g. Alcatel-Lucent, SAP, Nokia Siemens Networks), mobile network operators (e.g. France Telekom, Telefonica Spain, MobiTel Slovenia), research institutes (e.g. VTT Finland, Fraunhofer Germany), small and medium-sized enterprises from all over Europe, and high-ranking members of the EU commission. Representing evolaris next level GmbH, Thomas Putz (International Programmes) was the only participant from Austria. In the context of the technology platform eMobility, these stakeholders work on the further development of communication networks, fixed line as well as mobile and wireless networks.
evolaris takes an active part co-designing the "Strategic Applications Research Agenda (SARA)" within the work group "Leading-edge Application". This agenda serves the EU commission as a basis for the definition of research objectives and supports the development of the EU's research framework programme. Under the chairmanship of Dr Werner Mohr (Nokia Siemens Networks, eMobility Chairman) the activities and results of the last year were presented and discussed. Two key results are particularly worth mentioning: The completion of a new SARA version (http://www.emobility.eu.org/SRA/Documents/Emobility-SARA-100731.pdf) and the EU commission's acknowledgement of "transport" as one of the five strategic research topics for the eighth research framework programme.
Topics such as the use of the "digital dividend" - analogue TV frequencies that became vacant because of digitalisation - and development of new services for the "Future Internet" were debated. A very intense discussion was focused on the contribution of communication technologies to environmental protection and on energy saving in transport. Possibilities in the use of communication technologies in traffic management, green cars, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication were analysed. As a result of these discussions, eMobility members will apply for EU funding for several concrete research and implementation projects, e.g. parking management or electric mobility. As research partner, evolaris will participate in the project proposals and implementation in the field of mobile communication.