Quality of Life Through Nordic Smart Mobility and Connectivity: Funded Projects

The Nordic Mobility Innovation Platform (NMIP) aims to become the key facilitator of commercial deployment and scaling of MaaS services across the Nordic region, just like how NMT was formed as a nucleus for a digital revolution in telecommunications back in the day. 
 
In this project, the Nordic consortium will form a vision and an implementation roadmap for the platform, with an ambition to expand the consortium down the road.
 
Initially, the project will create Nordic added value by exploring business opportunities for SMEs in the Nordic mobility sector related to:
- The creation of open data standards and related data-sharing services.
- Integrated mobility solutions that facilitate roaming between different locations in the Nordics.
- The development of mobility ecosystems that facilitate open innovation.
- Potentially create a Nordic technology platform for mobility services.
 
Project partners: Kyyti Group, Ubigo, RISE, Transportøkonomisk institutt (TÖI)
Contact person: Pekka Niskanen, Kyyti Group

Standardisation is crucial for ITS and smart city transition processes. Standards help to reduce uncertainty in early innovation processes, to reduce risks and costs, and accelerate technological transition. However, ITS and smart cities standards are thus far the result of later-stage agreements and does not help reducing risk in early stages of transition.
 
In this project, the partners will therefore develop early stage standards for ITS and smart cities and build a Nordic consortium among the national standardisation organisations and central ITS and smart city actors in the Nordics.
 
This project will have accelerating effects for the whole Nordic business community connected to ITS and smart cities by:        
- Reduce time and costs.
- Developing early-stage standards that could be used as innovation accelerators.
- Use standardization committees as networks for technology transfers.
- Contribute to Nordic integration within the field of mobility and living.
- Contribute to a green and integrated infrastructure in the Nordics.
 
Project partners: Transportøkonomisk institutt (TÖI), Standard Norge
Contact person: Bjørn Klimek, TÖI

Public transport in the Nordics is an active contribution to support the Nordic welfare model. It provides the citizens with freedom of movement in a sustainable way. However, public transport – and hence mobility – is especially costly in rural areas. It is therefore a challenge to provide sufficient mobility services to people living and working in these areas. This is also a challenge outside the Nordic region.
 
With this project, the project partners aim to speed up the transition to more sustainable and smart mobility in rural areas. Having already established a Nordic mobility group, they now wish to build further on this by bringing in additional partners such as rural regions from each Nordic country and partner up with SMEs and/or entrepreneurs in order to co-create smart and sustainable solutions for rural areas.
 
The result of the final project will be concrete solutions to implement within rural areas in the Nordic region and to export to the rest of the world.
 
Project partners: Kollektivtrafikkforeningen, Svensk Kollektivtrafik, Trafiskelskaberne, Finnish Public Transport
Contact person: Christina Andersen, Kollektivtrafikkforeningen

There is need and a huge potential for re-defining how public transport is organised in the Nordic region. This is especially true for rural areas, where public transport ridership struggles with fixed routes only departing every 1-2 hours. With the Nordics consisting of more non-urban areas than urban areas, transport solutions for non-urban areas have huge potential. True dynamic shared on-demand services for public transport has the potential to offer better transport services for its population.
 
The Dynamic Shared Mobility On-Demand for Public Transport Services project aims to deploy a new and sustainable service that is expected to provide improved service quality to customers at reduced operational costs, compared to more traditional fixed route transport.
 
The solution is already demonstrated and tested, and in this project the partners will look at how to scale it to other non-urban areas in the Nordics by building a Nordic consortium.
 
Project partners: Acando AS, Spare Labs
Contact person: Ulf Carlson, Acando

By encouraging the public to use sustainable forms of transportation (walk, bike, public transport) society stands to save substantial amounts of money while protecting the environment for generations to come. Estimates from The Norwegian Automobile Association (NAF) suggest that Norway alone can save up to 42 billion NOK by being less dependent on the car and switch to more sustainable modes of transport.
 
What if we can give something back to those who contribute to society by taking more sustainable modes of transportation? In this project, the partners want to create a Nordic mobility platform that instantly rewards users by offering them rebates when they choose to walk, bike or use public transport. The platform will be run by actors from the public sector but open to all stakeholders. The rebates will be issued in form of a green Nordic cryptocurrency for mobility. The project partners seek to create a ground-breaking method they call “green mining”, meaning that the more we walk, bike and take public transport, the more cryptocurrency is created that can be distributed to the users of sustainable mobility.
 
Project partners: Trigger, Blockchangers, JAJA Architects, SJ
Contact person: Babak Behrad, Trigger

An important feature of smart mobility services is the ability to make use of integrated transport services offered by different actors and providers to make one seamless and smart journey. In order to achieve this, a minimum set of shared data across modes and transport providers is necessary. Today, no common Nordic platform or infrastructure exist to support this form of data exchange.
 
The purpose of this project is to develop and identify the fundamentals for the establishment of a Nordic innovation project for Nordic data exchange in this area. The project has two goals:

- Create an overview over state-of-the-art platforms/infrastructure and smart mobility data content in the five Nordic countries including a survey of actors, strategies and plans.

. Report and conclude whether or not to proceed with a larger project. If yes, the report will contain an outline for a Nordic Innovation project to establish an inter-Nordic smart mobility data platform/infrastructure.

The long-term aim of the project is to establish a platform/infrastructure for a minimum number of datasets that can provide inter-Nordic smart mobility services across borders and across transport modes. This entity will serve as an innovation platform for new services, and as an operational platform for running mobility services.
 
Project partners: ITS Norway, ITS Sweden, ITS Finland
Contact person: Trond Hovland, ITS Norway

Intelligent transportation will probably become a reality in the next decade by introducing autonomous public transport in cities. Today, the technology has a low level of user-machine interaction, but this limitation can be overcome by using virtual conversational agents.
 
The potential of this technology is very high. The conversational agent will help passengers by providing relevant information upon request, but most importantly it will be able to understand and assist users by giving route indications, general public transportation service information, or by calling emergency when needed, and support people with special needs to access the transportation system.
 
In this project, the partners will do a case study of the technology and concept by implementing and testing it on real autonomous buses in the Nordic region.
 
Project partners: Applied Autonomy, Chalmers University of Tech, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences
Contact person: Olav Madland, Applied Autonomy

While freight transport is needed to provide goods and services to Nordic citizens, it is also linked with negative effects such as CO2 emissions, noise and air pollution, and traffic safety problems – particularly in urban areas.
 
This project focuses on the role of city governments in decarbonising freight transport and will identify key areas that municipalities can work with to support freight decarbonisation, learning from best practice from Nordic municipalities.
 
This early-stage project will be a scoping project that brings together different actors across the Nordic region, with the aim of bringing together a consortium of different city and regional authorities, local freight transport providers, and large freight transport producers. The consortium will identify and implement innovative urban freight decarbonisation solutions, creating leading Nordic solutions that can be exported internationally.
 
Project partners: Trivector, CONCITO, Greater Copenhagen
Contact person: Anna Clark, Trivector