The SCALE project aims to upscale the deployment of mature C-ITS services and to support the technical development and impact assessments for large-scale deployment of new C-ITS use cases in different representative European Pilot and Operations Sites in Spain, France, Italy and Austria.
SICE contributes its technology and experience within the ITS sector to some of the operational sites that make up the Spanish pilot, which is led by the DGT (Jefatura Central de Tráfico) and involves public administrations such as MITMA (Ministerio de Transportes, Movilidad y Agenda Urbana), SCT (Servei Catalá de Transit), the Basque Government, Diputaciones forales de Bizkaia y Gipuzkoa, IZKAIA y , the Provincial Councils of Bizkaia, Guipuzkoa, and Bilbao City Council.
The project will put in place appropriate incentives to drive the transition towards a new generation of smart road transport and mobility services and thus contribute to ensure the European leadership on this matter, thus addressing persistent issues and challenges which so far have hampered the industrialisation of the C-ITS ecosystem in Europe.
To ensure the best conditions for replicability, the Pilot and Operations Sites leaders, along with academic experts, key industrial partners and road network managers will focus their technical and impact evaluation on three global challenges: technological, operational and socio-economical.
Then, the first challenge is technological: SCALE aims at addressing this issue by working on technical evaluation for each new use case to find the best technologies & architectures to better answer the stakeholders & end-users’ needs. C-ITS equipment needed at vehicle side will be deployed to receive information about the services, providing also a public app so all drivers have access to C-ITS services at least via cellular when ITS-G5 equipment may not be available
The second challenge is operational: SCALE aims at addressing the operational topics to level the services, by building a framework for the set up of operations: working on production launch processes and operational compliance by creating Production Launch Compliance sites, working on the maintenance topics and their consequences and of course on the European harmonization to prepare a certification process proposal
The third challenge is socio-economical: SCALE will help the discussions between the stakeholders to find business models that allow the deployment of added-valued services while taking account of the important investments of the different stakeholders, the idea being to find an equilibrium as to the costs-benefits for each of them
By addressing the challenges mentioned above, the scale project will contribute to the European ‘Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy’, while indirectly contributing to the European Green Deal, the Vision Zero Strategy, and the UN SDG 9, 11 and 13.
On 8 and 9 October, the European project SCALE (Strengthening C-ITS Adoption and Lining-up across Europe), coordinated by the French Ministry of Partnership with Territories and Decentralization, officially kicked off in Paris. SCALE, co-financed under the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) program, has a duration of 52 months, a value of 76 million euros, and brings together 88 partners from 5 different countries.