What was studied? This report studies the possibilities and challenges of establishing a high-power charging system for battery-electric aircraft (EA) within an operational airport environment, with a particular focus on enabling short turnaround times (TAT). The study integrates perspectives from a diverse group of stakeholders, including an airport owner, a charging equipment solution provider, an aircraft developer, a research institute, an innovation arena, and a testbed operator. The aim is to significantly enhance the common understanding and identify viable pathways for the efficient and safe implementation of EA charging systems. The report addresses the three key subsystems (airport, charging equipment, and aircraft) detailing their specific requirements, including e.g. technical, operational, regulatory, and safety considerations, followed by identification and evaluation of possible power system topologies and conceptual charging solutions. Smart control of EA charging systems is explored and modeled to support adequate system design and optimal utilization of available power capacity. Additionally, the report presents measurement results from an operational airport to better understand the current electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) environment. It also includes a review of aviation cybersecurity and offers initial recommendations for future risk assessments to ensure an efficient and safe deployment of EA charging systems. 

Engineering companies face the challenge of optimising margins within product platforms while balancing individual product optimisation and maximising platform commonality. Key obstacles include organisational silos, diverse design variables, design space allocation, and varying time perspectives. This paper proposes a value-based modelling methodology that integrates both internal and external variety within the manufacturer. Using an automotive Head-Up Display (HUD) case study, we demonstrate how to effectively utilise platform margins to maximise technological variety and minimise internal variety, thereby enhancing long-term system value. This approach helps design teams understand the implications of their decisions, optimise platform margins to meet evolving technological demands, reduce costs, and maximise value. Our findings advance the understanding of margin optimisation in product platforms and support informed decision-making for engineering companies facing conflicting objectives. 

All elektronik stör eller störs av radiovågor och elektromagnetiska fält. EMC – elektromagnetisk kompatibilitet – handlar om förmågan hos en apparat eller utrustning att fungera i sin elektromagnetiska omgivning utan att orsaka oacceptabla störningar. EMC är ett komplext ämne som det råder stor okunskap om i vårt samhälle. Många gånger upptäcks brister i EMC sent i processen och medför då kostsamma förseningar och problem. Det är därför viktigt att man redan på ett tidigt stadium tar hänsyn till EMC-direktiv och följer de lagar och regler som finns. I Introduktion till EMC beskriver författarna ämnet på ett enkelt, övergripande och lättfattligt sätt. Innehållet är upplagt så att boken både kan användas som ett uppslagsverk och läsas i utbildnings­syfte. Introduktion till EMC är tänkt som en första introduktion till EMC-området och som läsare behöver du inte ha några speciella förkunskaper, endast en grundläggande förståelse för ellära.

The VAMLAV project is a Vinnova FFI-funded project with the following partners: AstaZero, Zenseact, RISE and AI Sweden. The project set out to create a dataset that includes the computer vision sensors that many Advanced Driver-Assistance System (ADAS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS) vehicles use and complement them with a high-definition (HD)-map over a known geographic area. The VAMLAV dataset includes sensors such as camera, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), and Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) sensors. This dataset, publicly available at AI Sweden, offers a corresponding HD-map in OpenDRIVE format covering the Rural Road at AstaZero. The dataset includes adverse weather, multiple maps and drives around the track with emulated traffic work scenarios that can occur. Beyond creating the dataset, the project aimed to validate HD-maps by comparing them to other measurement technologies. It delved deeper into localization for ADS vehicles by comparing various measurement campaigns and designing high-accuracy anchor points. This data was later used to validate and update the HD-map. By comparing different measurement systems and samples on the map, the project hopes to increase the trust in the HD-map over a longer time. This data also makes it possible to experiment more within the field of crowdsourced HD-maps from different systems while having an easier time measuring the accuracy of such maps. Another big part of the project was related to safety therefore some data was collected where the project emulates traffic work at AstaZero. This use case is otherwise difficult to test and evaluate due to the stochastic nature of traffic work in real life. Where the system detected the traffic work with the help of map and sensor data and then distributed the information to other cars in the area.

 Automated vehicles and active safety functions based on sensor technology have been identified by the automotive industry as catalysts for improved safety, sustainability, accessibility, and efficiency. As technology advances, the applications of these systems are constantly expanding. Alongside these advancements, methods must be developed to evaluate and test AD and ADAS system performance and reliability in relevant and repeatable ways. This work outlines the main challenges in developing and evaluating a test method for generating road spray, a turbulent mix of fine water particles that reduce visibility caused by vehicles driving on wet surfaces. A hardware prototype and an appurtenant evaluation process were designed and produced to realize the test method. The evaluation process includes an automated software tool to quantify the prototype’s ability to degrade visibility and a method for automating sensor calibration for data collection at different locations and times. One of the key findings is the challenge of eliminating external disturbances in the test environment. Factors such as light and wind conditions significantly affect visibility through spray. The work concludes that controlling these factors is essential for achieving test repeatability. We successfully recreated road spray in a controlled environment, attenuating a sensor’s perceptive ability in steps of up to 80%, repeatedly within ±5-15%.

Research organizations, industry, and public authoritiesin Sweden and Norway have collaborated within the project “Research and Innovation Platform for Electric Roads” and investigated benefits of Electric Road Systems (ERS) to society, future business ecosystem, and how to support a large-scale deployment. The results cover electricity supply; environmental impact; construction, operations and maintenance; economic impact; business models; and standards. 

Electric Road Systems (ERS) is a technology area that has the potential to significantly reduce fossil fuel dependency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce air pollution, reduce noise in urban environments, and increase energy efficiency in the transport sector. ERS deployed in commercial operation will need to charge for the use of infrastructure, electric energy and potentially other services. An ERS revenue management solution need to handle use cases with multiple actors, roles and commercial relationships. In addition, the future revenue management solutions should be interoperable and independent of business models in order to flexibly meet the needs of new situations for emerging ERS.

Electric road systems (ERS) is a technology area that has the potential to significantly reduce fossil fuel dependency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce air pollution, and increase energy efficiency in the transport sector. The implementation of ERS at national and international levels will however be associated with large investments and it is therefore important to study the economic impact and benefits for the society. The present work describes methodology for conducting socioeconomic analysis on electrification of an existing road infrastructure.

SEEL Swedish Electric Transport Laboratory is being established as a new independent test centre for research and development in the field of electromobility including batteries. The aim is to enhance knowledge development and to improve collaboration between enterprises and researchers. Electrification of the transport sector is to be speeded up at SEEL’s facilities in Borås, Gothenburg and Nykvarn in Sweden. SEEL works together with companies from Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Poland in an important project of common European interest for batteries, IPCEI Batteries.

Due to the development of new radar technology for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving (AD) applications, testing radars for real world conditions is highly desirable. However, testing autonomous driving functions on public roads can be dangerous and the tests results are not always reproducible. In this paper, we present a novel Over-the-Air (OTA) Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) radar target simulator for testing radar systems. The complete simulation setup including hardware and software implementations will be presented in this article. We illustrate a test procedure by creating Euro NCAP scenarios, and explain the benefits and importance of realtime HIL testing of automotive radars.

An electric vehicle is a complex system where multipleconverters are connected to a common DC-bus. In order todetermine the current and voltage harmonics on the DC-bus, allingoing components and subsystems needs to be modeled on adetailed level. In this paper, the focus lies on cable modelingwhere a high frequency cable model is incorporated in a drivesystem model. The resulting current and voltage ripple in thesystem is then compared to measurements in an experimentalsetup. Due to the improved cable model and an extensive systemparameter identification procedure, the usage of the systemmodel was found valid for harmonic frequencies up to 1 MHz.The main harmonic component at 20 kHz was simulated with~1.7 % accuracy and the components in the range 35 kHz to200 kHz with <6 % accuracy compared to measurements.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) over-the-air (OTA) testing is a standardized procedure to evaluate the performance of MIMO-capable devices such as mobile phones and laptops. With the growth of the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) service, the need for vehicular communication testing is expected to increase significantly. The so-called multi-probe anechoic chamber (MPAC) setup is standardized for MIMO OTA testing. Typically, a test zone of 0.85 wavelength in diameter can be achieved with an 8-probe MPAC setup, which can encompass device-under-test (DUT) of small form factors. However, a test zone of this size may not be large enough to encompass DUTs such as cars. In this article, the sufficient number of OTA probes for the MPAC setup for car testing is investigated with respect to the emulation accuracy. Our investigation shows that the effective antenna distance of the DUT is more critical than its physical dimensions to determine the required number of OTA probes. In addition, throughput measurements are performed under the standard SCME UMa and UMi channel models with the 8-probe MPAC setup and the wireless cable setup, i.e. another standardized testing setup. The results show reasonably good agreement between the two setups for MIMO OTA testing with cars under the standard channel models. 

The analytical solution for a loaded reverberation chamber has been investigated. In consistence with earlier works, it is shown that adding a dielectric (non-absorbing) into the chamber will reduce the eigenfrequency of the chamber. This can be a step toward lowering usable frequency inside the Reverberation Chamber and representing the modes density similarly to an empty chamber.

As more and more advanced electronics are incorporated into devices and vehicles, there is a need to improve and refine the test methods for performance assessment of electromagnetic compatibility. Traditional standards in reverberation chamber electromagnetic compatibility immunity assessment define the test level according to a calibration based on an average of maximum received electrical field probe readings. In this paper, we propose a converging approach based on the average, in combination with an additional offset to generate a quantile defined test level. 

In this paper, we elaborate on EMC immunity tests in reverberation chambers of full-sized vehicles as well as these products' corresponding electromagnetic susceptibility. It is described how vehicles have regions or volumes (i.e., cavities), with sometimes installed hardware as well as software, which potentially is susceptible to electromagnetic interference, and how these cavities during test have properties (deterministic to ergodic) implying frequency-dependent properties of the electrical fields. Number of degrees of freedom for the electric fields is used to explain the behaviour of EMC, from deterministic coherent resonances and all the way to ergodic regions. 

In this paper, the influence of a limited number of radio frequency connections between two Rayleigh fading environments, also known as the keyhole effect, is theoretically investigated for higher-order MIMO systems. It is shown that the effect of a limited number of keyholes is kept stable or is even reduced as the number of keyholes is equal to or larger than the MIMO system order. The results are relevant for over-the-air testing with connected Rayleigh fading systems, such as a channel emulator connected to a reverberation chamber, or a reverberation chamber connected to another reverberation chamber (nested reverberation chambers).

High-power inductive power transfer (IPT) systems for charging light and heavy electric vehicles pose safety concerns if they are installed in uncontrolled environments. Within the framework of the European Project EMPIR-16ENG08 MICEV, a wide experimental and numerical study was conducted to assess the exposure of the general public to IPT stray magnetic fields for two different exposure scenarios: (1) for an IPT model system derived from the SAE J2954 standard operating at 85 kHz for a light electric vehicle coupled with the model of a realistic car-body model; and (2) for an IPT model system with a maximum rated power of 50 kW at 27.8 kHz for a real minibus that was reproduced with some simplifications in two different 3D finite element method (FEM) simulation tools (Opera 3D and CST software). An ad hoc measurement survey was carried out at the minibus charging station to validate the simulations of the real bus station for both aligned and misaligned IPT coils. Based on this preliminary study, a safety factor was chosen to ensure a conservative dosimetric analysis with respect to the model approximations. As highlighted in this study, the vehicle-body serves as an efficient screen to reduce the magnetic field by at least three orders of magnitude close to the coils. By applying FEM, computed spatial distribution to the Sim4Life software, the exposure of three Virtual Population human anatomical phantoms (one adult, one child, and a newborn) was assessed. The three phantoms were placed in different postures and locations for both exposure scenarios. The basic restriction limits, established by the current guidelines, were never exceeded within the vehicles; however, the basic restrictions were exceeded when an adult crouched outside the minibus, i.e., near the coils, or when a newborn was placed in the same location. Borderline values were observed in the light car. In the case of the bus, limits coming from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) guidelines are never exceeded, while basic restrictions coming from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) guidelines are exceeded up to 12% for an adult and up to 38% for a newborn. This paper presents novel dosimetric data generated in an IPT system for heavy vehicles and confirms some of the literature data on light vehicles. © 2020 by the authors.

This is the report from the literature study of the RoBound (Ro-ro space Boundary fire protection) project. RoBound is carried out by RISE Research Institutes of Sweden AB.The ro-ro ships have a large longitudinal space where cars, trucks and other cargo can be rolled on and rolled off. Despite improved fire protection regulations, many fire accidents have occurred on ro-ro ships and there are no signs of them diminishing in number or magnitude. During a review of the fire safety regulations, the IMO correspondence group has particularly pinpointed the need for additional experimental data or results of scientific studies regarding:- The performance of A-60 boundaries in case of a ro-ro space fire, especially to prevent fire spread to accommodation spaces; and- The performance of A-0 boundaries in case of a ro-ro space fire, especially to prevent fire spread between ro-ro spaces.In this process, Sweden has moreover underlined the issue of the smoke tightness of A-class divisions with doors. While smoke tightness is a requirement for A-class divisions, the fire resistance test method in the Fire Test Procedures (FTP) Code is not designed to evaluate hazards associated with smoke spread. RoBound purpose is to clarify the performance of “state-of-the-art” fire boundaries between ro-ro spaces and accommodation spaces or other ro-ro spaces, and to give recommendations on how sufficient fire containment is ensured. RoBound aims to strengthen competence and influence regulation development regarding fire divisions of ro-ro ships.The main result from the literature study is that :- The concept of horizontal fire zones, allowing ro-ro spaces and special category spaces to be as long as the whole ship, was introduced in 1967 according to resolution A.122(V), but was made mandatory long time after. In SOLAS 1974, entered into force in 1980 the main vertical zones was included in the regulation.- The land based method will not be used in RoBound since some smoke tightness solutions are based on an intumescent sealing joint. In order to be activated, the joint needs high temperature which is not reach in the land based standard.- Hose ports, also denoted “Cat holes”, are used on board with different experiences. Some think it works fine, other that it more problem. Level of maintenance vary from almost nothing to a lot of hassle. It is concluded that they reduce the amount of smoke spreading through the door compared with have a wedge and doorway open.- Doors to the ro-ro space is not perceived as smoke tight, and so are not lift doors. Crew is aware of the importance of well closing fire doors, checks are made daily.- Fire insulation in ro-ro spaces can be damaged by loading of trailers or during maintenance work. There can also be water damage (testing of drenchers, cleaning or by rain) and general wear and tear. Damaged insulation happens but not too often so it is not experienced as a problem for the crew.

The International Maritime Organization, through its correspondence group on fire safety of ro-pax ships, has underlined the need for more scientific studies regarding the performance of boundaries in case of a ro-ro space fire, especially to prevent fire and smoke spread to accommodation spaces. Following these discussions, Swedish Flag State has underlined the issue of the smoke tightness of doors in A class divisions. While smoke tightness is a requirement for A class divisions, the fire resistance test method in the FTP Code is not designed to evaluate hazards associated with smoke spread.RISE has carried out the RoBound project to meet this need.To increase the understanding of this weakness in the FTP Code, RISE has performed experimental tests of two almost identical doors. The only difference between the two doors was the presence or not of an intumescent joint between the leaf and the frame of the door, intended to prevent the passage of smoke. The doors were exposed to the test for fire boundaries in Part 3 of the FTP Code, which exposes specimens to a simulated fire by a temperature increase according to the standard fire curve ISO 834.A modification of the standard experimental rig was added and consisted of the addition of a canopy above the tested doors to gather and measure the rate of carbon dioxide to quantify the amount of smoke leaking from the doors. This set up of canopy and measurement rig was taken from the standard EN 81-58 which is applied for elevator doors acting as fire barriers.The results of the tests showed that both doors marginally failed the A-60 integrity criteria since there was presence of a sustained flame at the unexposed side before 60 minutes of test. However, both doors satisfied to the insulation criteria by maintaining a rise of temperature lower than 140 °C in average at the unexposed side. The main difference between the doors was that the door with the intumescent joints presented a rate of smoke leakage which was almost half of that of the fire door without intumescent joints.This result clearly shows the importance of evaluating the smoke tightness of A class doors during testing and the need

Future automated vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems are highly dependent on sensors to detect their environment as well as robust, accurate, and cost-effective sensor systems for positioning. 

Global Navigation Satellite systems (GNSS) provide a key technology that enables an absolute position estimate and Network-RTK (Real Time Kinematic) has the potential to meet the requirements of cost, accuracy, and availability. This technology is based on correction data being received from a fixed reference station via e.g. mobile communication. Current implementations have been driven by requirements from applications which operate within a limited region for lengthy periods of time, such as surveying and precision agriculture. These applications can tolerate relatively long initialization times and can afford expensive equipment.

The mass market wants to benefit from infrastructure in place for these applications, but the requirements are somewhat different. Problems occur when the device moves from the coverage area of one reference station to another and reinitialization must be made. Consumer devices must also deliver similar performance with inexpensive components. In addition to this, the existing public-sector system for distribution of correction data, in Sweden governed by Lantmäteriet/ SWEPOS, is not designed for handling a large number of clients and efficiently distributing correction data to these clients based on their location.The telecom industry in 3GPP (Third generation partnership project) is currently addressing the need for a scalable provisioning of network RTK corrections. Based on the 3GPP specification, the project aimed to develop, implement, test and demonstrate an efficient distribution system for Network-RTK correction data in order to enable cm-level accuracy GNSS positioning for a large number of mobile platforms e.g. automated vehicles.

The NPAD project has:

• Leveraged the existing Lantmäteriet/SWEPOS GNSS reference infrastructure to implement a virtual network of reference stations that provided coverage over selected test areas suitable for supporting a large number of simultaneous users.
• Implemented a scalable GNSS correction data provisioning based on the ongoing work in 3GPP that provides correction data from the reference network to mobile devices;
• Developed test cases for automated vehicle platforms related to positioning and implemented demonstrators;
• Investigated tools and methods for validating the accuracy of integrated GNSS positioning and navigation systems.

The project was coordinated by RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and involved besides Lantmäteriet and AstaZero the following industrial partners: AB Volvo, Caliterra, Einride, Ericsson, Scania, and Waysure.

Heavy vehicles rolling on wet roads produce splash and spray clouds. These aerosols reduce the visibility of other drivers, contribute to a small, but quantifiable proportion of road traffic accidents and affect the operational capabilities of autonomous vehicles travelling near them. Even though knowing the physical properties of these aerosols is essential for testing and validating sensors for environment perception and recognition of autonomous vehicles, there is little information about them. In this work the physical characteristics of spray clouds produced by heavy vehicles rolling on wet asphalt were measured by optical methods. Time resolved droplet size, mass concentration, number density, light extinction and contrast attenuation parallel and perpendicular to the travelling direction of the vehicle were measured. Vehicle velocity, vehicle configuration and water depth were varied during the tests. Results show that the average droplet diameter ranges between 100 and 400 μm with maximum diameters of almost 4 mm. Mass concentration gamuts between 0,2 and 0,7 kg/m3 with peaks surpassing 1 kg/m3 while number density spans between 20 and 40 cm−3 and occasionally exceeds 100 cm−3. Light extinction can reach levels as high as 0,2 m−1 and contrast, evaluated from images, can reach values under 0,1. 

As more and more advanced wireless technologies are incorporated into vehicles, there is a need to refine the test methods used for assessing the performance. Traditional test setups for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems have been developed for relatively small devices such as handsets and tablets. At the same time, there is a desire to replace vehicular field tests with lab testing, for more efficient and accurate testing. This paper evaluates over-the-air verification methods for MIMO communication systems, which may incorporate vehicle-sized antenna systems and that can be implemented in a lab. Different methods are compared by means of a round robin campaign. The results from the campaign indicate that performance assessment representative to real-world operation can be achieved.

Data have been published stating that of all heavy trucks (>16 ton) that drive at least 5 days per year on the main Swedish road network (Malmö-Göteborg-Stockholm), only 15% drive more than 50% of their annual mileage on this road network . Intuitively, this gives the impression that charging infrastructure placed on the main road network cannot contribute greatly to electrification of heavy trucks. Meanwhile, route-based simulation of charging preferences on the Swedish road network has concluded that if Electric Road Systems (ERS) infrastructure is deployed on the main Swedish road network, >95% of heavy traffic on this road network would have sufficient financial incentive to becomes users of the ERS charging infrastructure.

Assessment of the future energy and power demand for charging of road traffic, per Swedish county, municipality and type of charging infrastructure The report forecasts future needs for electrical energy and power for charging electric vehicles throughout Sweden, with a particular focus on Västra Götaland. Annual energy demand and peak loads are forecast per Swedish county and municipality. Load curves divided into different categories of charging infrastructure are presented for scenarios with and without load balancing from evening to night, as well as where a share of the energy for road transport is transferred via hydrogen or electric roads. The uncertainty in the forecasts is substantial around 2035, due to uncertainty about how fast electrification of road traffic will proceed. Factors affecting the rate of electrification include taxes and subsidies that affect the cost difference between owning electric vehicles and internal combustion engine vehicles, electricity market price stability, crude oil prices and interest rates. The rate of electrification is also strongly influenced by the rate of expansion and pricing of charging infrastructure, where permits for new grid connections are a bottleneck for expansion. The report emphasizes the importance of achieving load balancing that redistributes vehicle charging from late afternoons to late evenings and nights, particularly within larger residential areas. Solving this challenge has a higher priority for the successful electrification of road transport than getting public fast charging stations in place, as charging at homes and truck depots form the backbone of an electrified road transport system. Challenges and opportunities with Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology are discussed. The report also highlights the uncertainty surrounding the future use of driverless vehicles and their potential impact on charging needs and traffic patterns. The forecasts indicate that the total electricity demand for road transport will be slightly lower in winter than in summer, due to reduced traffic work and despite increased energy consumption at low temperatures. Electric roads would only increase energy demand if contributing to a faster rate of electrification, while large-scale use of fuel cell trucks and locally produced hydrogen would increase energy demand in the long term by roughly 10% and in the short term more, if only replacing combustion engine vehicles. Large-scale use of synthetic gasoline and diesel produced from green hydrogen is considered unlikely, but would greatly increase energy demand as long as internal combustion engine vehicles are still in use.

This report presents an analysis to forecast the utilization of a future electric road system (ERS) network in Sweden. The analysis, limited to ERS use by heavy trucks, focuses on how ERS utilization is expected to evolve under different network scopes and levels of pricing. In addition, the socio-economic impact of adding ERS to the Swedish charging mix is estimated, and sensitivity analysis is performed with regards to the availability of infrastructure for static charging and national policies about biofuel use.

The questions are answered through comparative simulations in MOSTACHI, a tool developed to study spatio-temporal system dynamics during transport electrification, with parameter assumptions aligned with the Swedish Transport Administration’s guidelines (ASEK8). The analysis covers ERS networks spanning from 1000 to 3000 km and outcomes are compared across a range of indicators, including ERS utilization, system costs, transport electrification, CO2 emissions, and demand for energy, biofuels and batteries.

Simulations suggest that economic-environmental benefits of a Swedish ERS network would be maximized when the dynamic charging fee is set low enough that 80-90% of within-network traffic would be given economic incentives to charge dynamically. With a higher fee differentiated by willingness to pay (WTP), and 70-80% utilization, the full investment cost could likely be recouped within 25 years. Viable pricing is approximately in the span between that of night-time depot charging and day-time public fast-charging. WTP for all types of charging declines over time. Simulated WTP for dynamic charging is observed to be greater along the E4 than on the Swedish west coast.

A 1500 km ERS network operational from 2035 is forecast to raise the electrified share of road freight within the network from 50% to 90% and reduce total remaining national ICET traffic by one third (e.g., 40% to 60%). The effect size at national scale is determined by the scope of the ERS network, with larger networks achieving greater impact. ERS impact on traffic outside the network is minor in the simulations. Rapid ubiquitous buildout of overnight charging for trucks is recommended regardless of and in addition to ERS investments.

The opportunity cost of not investing in ERS in Sweden is estimated at over four billion euro until 2050, or 300 million euro per year of delay. These opportunity cost estimates assume very cheap batteries, expensive ERS and quick expansion of static charging. Under assumed future EU biofuel policy, ERS is forecast to reduce cumulative Swedish CO2 emissions from heavy trucks until 2050 by approximately 8 Mt, with an emissions opportunity cost of approximately 300 kt per year of delay. If Sweden is on a path to electrify less than 50% of road freight by 2035, opportunity cost estimates increase.

This study assesses the potential for decarbonizing EU road transport through several pathways, focusing on the feasibility of achieving impact by 2035. Through comprehensive literature review, we compare the distance-levelized cost, lifecycle GHG emissions, and scalability of combustion engine vehicles (three fuels), battery-electric vehicles (BEVs, three charging methods), and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. We consider projected transport growth and the current age composition and use of vehicles in Europe, segmented into four regions. Biofuels, hydrogen, and e-fuels are not found to have potential to significantly contribute to further GHG emissions before 2035 due to scalability and technological limitations. BEVs emerge as the only viable strategy for achieving zero tailpipe emissions at scale, with effective lifecycle GHG reductions constrained by the rate of decarbonization of steel production, battery production and EU electricity production. By 2035, embodied battery emissions are expected to be the dominant source of lifecycle emissions from electric vehicles. The environmental benefits of a BEV transition are primarily limited by the rate at which the vehicle stock can be electrified, with new electric vehicle sales contributing primarily to decarbonization in Northen and Western Europe. Combining the expected buildout of static charging infrastructure with a proposed pan-European Electric Road System (ERS) network is found to greatly accelerate the transition to electrified road transport, including in otherwise late-to-decarbonize segments, by removing cost, weight, and supply barriers to retrofitting older combustion engine cars with new electric powertrains. Other effects of an ERS network are found to be substantially reduced embodied emissions from BEV production, resulting from reduced battery capacity per vehicle, and reduced levelized freight costs. However, possibly insurmountable political and bureaucratic barriers must be overcome ERS to play any meaningful part in decarbonization of road transport within the coming decade. If the barriers can be overcome, the economic and ecological rewards are substantial. Despite identifying pathways for substantial emissions reductions, the study does not identify any technical pathway through which the EU road transport sector will not greatly exceed its fair share of global GHG emissions. In addition, our review of strategies to achieve modal shift and road transport demand reductions also fails to find indications that interventions in these areas will have GHG reduction effects of desired magnitude within the required timeframe, unless costs of vehicle ownership and use are raised substantially. Further policy research is urgently needed to find repeatable and socially just interventions through which total transport work, the size of the vehicle stock and embodied GHG emissions per vehicle can be reduced substantially across the entire EU before 2035.

We present a novel methodology for calculating the density of charging infrastructure required to enable electrification of all passenger cars in a large geographic region. We combine this method with models of charging infrastructure cost, forecasts of levelized costs for operating combustion engine and battery electric cars and forecasts of market penetration, to calculate the socio-economic value of passenger car electrification over the 2020-2040 period. Recommendations for urban regions are derived based on application of the method to Stockholm County, Sweden. Electrification is shown to generate long-term savings of up to 1800 euro per car-year and the opportunity cost of delaying the transition by a single year is comparable to the full cost of deploying the infrastructure that enables the shift. Large-scale deployment of dynamic charging is a cost-viable alternative to static charging for full electrification of urban passenger car fleets.

More Digitalized Rural Businesses – The Path Forward…

This project targeted business promoters and Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), including micro-enterprises, within the green sectors (primarily agriculture and food).

The project has:

• Assessed the needs and opportunities for support for the target group micro and small enterprises in the green sectors.

• Evaluated the offerings of business promoters aimed at increasing the digital maturity of this target group.

• Highlighted experiences from digitalization in other industries and adapted a tool to digitalize SMEs in agriculture and food.

The European Union aims to accelerate the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises through a network of European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIH) to enhance their competitiveness. However, how can this be best achieved for rural businesses? The project demonstrated how companies in primary production can benefit from the EDIH network.

The long-term goal of the project was to increase the digital maturity of Swedish micro and small enterprises in rural areas, contributing to increased production with robust economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Another goal was to enhance collaboration among business promotion actors to better understand how they can assist micro and small enterprises in rural areas to embrace the opportunities of digitalization

The project compared the support needs of SMEs and micro-enterprises in the green sectors in rural areas with the available support from business promoters. This comparison identified certain gaps that business promoters can address to develop and improve their offerings. The project disseminated knowledge about digitalization experiences from other industries and adapted a tool to further digitalize SMEs in agriculture and food. This tool is well-suited for use by EDIHs and has been shared with various business promoters. The project also compared the contributions of an EDIH focused on the needs of the target group with other initiatives aimed at the same group.

A new concept has been developed for characterizing the real-time evolution of the three-dimensional pore and lamella microstructure of bread during baking using synchrotron X-ray microtomography (SRµCT). A commercial, combined microwave-convective oven was modified and installed at the TOMCAT synchrotron tomography beamline at the Swiss Light Source (SLS), to capture the 3D dough-to-bread structural development in-situ at the micrometer scale with an acquisition time of 400 ms. This allowed characterization and quantitative comparison of three baking technologies: (1) convective heating, (2) microwave heating, and (3) a combination of convective and microwave heating. A workflow for automatic batchwise image processing and analysis of 3D bread structures (1530 analyzed volumes in total) was established for porosity, individual pore volume, elongation, coordination number and local wall thickness, which allowed for evaluation of the impact of baking technology on the bread structure evolution. The results showed that the porosity, mean pore volume and mean coordination number increase with time and that the mean local cell wall thickness decreases with time. Small and more isolated pores are connecting with larger and already more connected pores as function of time. Clear dependencies are established during the whole baking process between the mean pore volume and porosity, and between the mean local wall thickness and the mean coordination number. This technique opens new opportunities for understanding the mechanisms governing the structural changes during baking and discern the parameters controlling the final bread quality. © 2023 The Author(s)

The Swedish Transport Administration Research and Innovation fund for Maritime research funded the project "Reference data and algorithms to support research and development of smart ships". The project goes by the working name, and is communicated as, Reeds. It responds to a synthesis of a number of different needs identified in previous projects and studies. The background to the project is that in recent years the focus has been on developing algorithms to interpret and act on the physical environment around different types of craft. In order to be able to develop and evaluate these algorithms, it has become clear that open datasets and a fair benchmarking platform are required that allow various developers in industries and researchers to evaluate algorithms. In the road vehicle sector, Kitti, as of 2013, is the largest dataset used as a reference dataset. The dataset in this project contains sensor data from several data collection occasions within a maritime context, from high-precision sensors such as cameras, radar, lidar, and IMU. For marine applications, there has been no similar dataset with anywhere near the same amount of data and time synchronisation between sensors. The reference data and reference algorithms were available periodically during the project through an online service where researchers and developers could upload their algorithms to use the dataset.

In addition to the dataset itself, Reeds adds additional strengths compared to other reference datasets:

-        New approach to comparing algorithms fairly, where new algorithms are always compared on a centralised hardware in a cloud service and re-evaluated when new data is added, i.e. an unbiased algorithm evaluation service.

-        Method that combines NTP and PTP time protocols for synchronisation between the sensors with microsecond accuracy

-        More types and more modern sensors that can be used at a higher level of abstraction and can thus be applied in more areas.

-        Sensor fusion of both onboard and land-side sensors

-        Identify areas of application for navigation and surveillance on land based on the algorithms developed during the project and the use of new sensor types not established in shipping.

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The project built up a maritime reference data set that enables the creation of a digital description for the ship's surrounding environment and developed reference algorithms to demonstrate new navigation and monitoring methodology in the area of "enhanced navigation".

"Enhanced navigation" is defined under the project as the use of new technology based on developments in digitisation and autonomous functions, where new navigation methods use sensors both on board and ashore to increase maritime safety and robustness. The project has built a web-based user interface referred to in the report as "Crowsnest" that handles these new sensors and visualises this data in a familiar interface similar to an overlay in ECDIS that is openly available for the public to build on. Which was used for the evaluation and concept development of new user interfaces based on feedback from pilots and VTS operators.

By providing reference datasets and reference algorithms with demonstrations, researchers and companies now have the opportunity to develop algorithms for the intelligent and autonomous ships of the future.

Systems of systems arise when independently owned, operated and developed systems can achieve mutual benefits by working together. In collaborative systems of systems, there is no directing entity that instructs others how and when to collaborate. Instead, the collaboration relies on independent decisions by the constituent systems to form collaborating constellations, and the benefits are emergent properties of this. In this paper, we describe a design method for engineering collaborative systems of systems. We apply the method to the design of a collaborative system of systems for mobility in a rural setting close to an urban area and to truck platooning.

 As automated vehicle technology advances, measures for their safe containment become increasingly important. To this end, geofencing is a prominent alternative as a fundamental technique for triggering specific actions when vehicles enter or leave a predefined operational area. Today’s geofencing methods usually fall short in safety-critical use cases, failing to contain vehicles, or triggering needless intervening actions. This work presents the novel model predictive geofence, which predicts future transgressions based on vehicle dynamics-informed real-time decisions. We studied its performance compared to representative approaches, both physically at the AstaZero Proving Ground in Sweden and through numerical calculations. Our geofence utilised the operational area more effectively than current approaches. Furthermore, the model predictive geofence successfully contained the vehicle to the operational area in all experiments, preventing exit with a low amount of false stops. The model predictive geofence presents an applicable approach for quick decision-making regarding the containment of vehicles in operational areas. 

Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) typically experience reduced powertrain energy efficiency under low-torque operating conditions. This issue can be mitigated by torque modulation, i.e., alternating driver torque demand between zero and an appropriate value. This paper aims to maximize the efficiency improvement of torque modulation and investigate its potential in two powertrain topologies: single and dual motor powertrains. To this end, optimal modulation strategies are proposed for both powertrains, considering overall powertrain energy losses and specific powertrain characteristics. Additionally, the adverse impact on driver comfort and powertrain durability due to the pulsating torque is examined. The results suggest that the proposed optimal modulation strategies can enhance powertrain efficiency while maintaining acceptable levels of driver comfort and powertrain durability. In addition, complementary modulation and torque distribution can be applied in the dual motor powertrain to provide further energy-saving potential and reduced impact on driver comfort.