Transport Research Environment with Novel Perspectives (TRENoP)
Transport Research Environment with Novel Perspectives (TRENoP) is a collaboration between KTH, LiU, and VTI.
Increasing concerns about environmental, climate, energy, and natural resources, coupled with growing demand for transport, put pressure on improved efficiency and performance of the transport systems. When identifying solutions, environmental, energy, and global climate issues must be considered, in balance with transport's economic and societal benefits. Technology may be an enabler for innovation, but the policy and business models for deployment with a systems perspective often determine success. Hence, policy, regulation, digitalisation, vehicle, and infrastructure technology are all interlinked when striving to find implementation paths towards greener, more efficient, smarter, and safer transport systems. Therefore, TRENoP builds an environment that fosters interdisciplinary, basic and applied research to find implementation paths towards sustainable, safe, efficient, and resilient transport systems.
Transport Research Environment with Novel Perspectives (TRENoP) was initiated in 2010. The initial focus of the research has been and still is on surface transport. Surface transport is at the heart of many KTH/LiU/VTI activities. Furthermore, even marginal improvements in surface transport can have significant benefits, since road vehicles dominate transport energy consumption (74% in Europe). Urbanization and demand for personal mobility will increase congestion even more, and changing demographics (immigrants, aging population, etc) and user behaviour will put more emphasis on servicing daily mobility needs. With a decrease and stagnation of the freight and passenger transports after the economic crisis in 2009, an increase after that, the COVID pandemic that put transportation on hold, war and crisis in the world, we see that the demand for greener, more efficient, smarter, and safer transportation is of utmost importance för the society. As a response to the challenges and with the introduction of electrification, connectivity, and automation, along with AI, there is also a plethora of various people and freight transport innovations from micro mobility, consolidation centres, and hubs to new vehicle concepts that need to be researched on to create knowledge on their potential or negative effects. This also brings with it significant changes in vehicle systems and human interactions and how the vehicle system and overall transport system will impact the built environments and the road and energy infrastructures, and vice versa.
TRENoP:s mission is to build and integrate knowledge and competences necessary to drive the shift towards sustainable, safe, efficient and resilient transport systems. This will be achieved through:
- Producing, disseminating, and applying research that improves the understanding of the transport system and technology, its users, and interactions with society in general, and supports innovation in the transport sector.
- Design, experiment, analyse, and evaluate solutions for the transport system at different levels, building on the strength of vehicle and infrastructure technology and transport system analysis knowledge in various fields in TRENoP.
- Strengthen, connect, and bridge research in several environments, centres, and strategic initiatives at and between KTH, LiU, and VTI.
