4 research outputs found
The role of logistics services in smart cities: the experience of ENCLOSE project
Get PDFFreight transport is one of the primary components of the economic and social system not only in European towns. It is now widely recognised that sustainable goods distribution, particularly in urban areas and city centres (indicated also as City Logistics), is the objective to be achieved as environmental issues play an increasingly dominant role in the overall mobility governance and also in the emerging “smart city” initiatives.
Of course there is a link between transport efficiency and infrastructures, but traffic congestion in urban areas and city centres can be reduced also by efficient freight distribution processes based innovative organizational and business models.
In EU, the interest in city logistics solutions, is growing among Local Authorities, not only for more efficient and higher quality services and traffic congestion reduction but also for achieving an increased territory governance.
A significant number of real applications have implemented in many EU towns and under EU programmes with an emerging city logistics approach indicated as SULP (Sustainable Urban Logistics Plan) based an appropriate mix of different measures to be selected among different already demonstrated services like: Urban Consolidation Centres, optimised urban freight transport and delivery plans, clean vehicles and low emission technologies, restrictions and public incentive policies, ICT platform, last mile and value added services, etc. The SULP is the tool with related guidelines for integrating the city logistics processes within the overall management of urban mobility currently indicated at European level as Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan - SUMP.
In this context ENCLOSE Project, started in May 2012 under IEE - Intelligent Energy Europe programme, has the main objective of raising awareness about the challenges of energy efficient and sustainable urban logistics in European Small-/Mid-size Historic Towns (SMHTs) and about the concrete opportunities to achieve highly significant improvements and benefits by implementing and operating suitable and effective measures, schemes and framework approaches specifically targeted to such class of urban environments.
ENCLOSE Project aims to develop Sustainable Urban Logistics Plans (SULP) for Small-/Mid-size towns (SMTs) integrated in Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP)
The SURPRISE demonstrator: a super-resolved compressive instrument in the visible and medium infrared for Earth Observation
Get PDFWhile Earth Observation (EO) data has become ever more vital to understanding the planet and addressing societal challenges, applications are still limited by revisit time and spatial resolution. Though low Earth orbit missions can achieve resolutions better than 100 m, their revisit time typically stands at several days, limiting capacity to monitor dynamic events. Geostationary (GEO) missions instead typically provide data on an hour-basis but with spatial resolution limited to 1 km, which is insufficient to understand local phenomena.
In this paper, we present the SURPRISE project - recently funded in the frame of the H2020 programme – that gathers the expertise from eight partners across Europe to implement a demonstrator of a super-spectral EO payload - working in the visible (VIS) - Near Infrared (NIR) and in the Medium InfraRed (MIR) and conceived to operate from GEO platform -with enhanced performance in terms of at-ground spatial resolution, and featuring innovative on-board data processing and encryption functionalities. This goal will be achieved by using Compressive Sensing (CS) technology implemented via Spatial Light Modulators (SLM). SLM-based CS technology will be used to devise a super-resolution configuration that will be exploited to increase the at-ground spatial resolution of the payload, without increasing the number of detector’s sensing elements at the image plane. The CS approach will offer further advantages for handling large amounts of data, as is the case of superspectral payloads with wide spectral and spatial coverage. It will enable fast on-board processing of acquired data for information extraction, as well as native data encryption on top of native compression.
SURPRISE develops two disruptive technologies: Compressive Sensing (CS) and Spatial Light Modulator (SLM). CS optimises data acquisition (e.g. reduced storage and transmission bandwidth requirements) and enables novel onboard processing and encryption functionalities. SLM here implements the CS paradigm and achieves a super-resolution architecture. SLM technology, at the core of the CS architecture, is addressed by: reworking and testing off-the-shelf parts in relevant environment; developing roadmap for a European SLM, micromirror array-type, with electronics suitable for space qualification.
By introducing for the first time the concept of a payload with medium spatial resolution (few hundreds of meters) and near continuous revisit (hourly), SURPRISE can lead to a EO major breakthrough and complement existing operational services.
CS will address the challenge of large data collection, whilst onboard processing will improve timeliness, shortening time needed to extract information from images and possibly generate alarms. Impact is relevant to industrial competitiveness, with potential for market penetration of the demonstrator and its components
