D.8.4: Impact assessment

The aim of the ICT4CART project is to design, implement and test a versatile ICT infrastructure in real-life conditions, which will enable the transition towards higher levels of automation. It focuses on four high-value use cases: Smart Parking & IoT services, dynamic adaptation of vehicle automation level based on infrastructure information, intersection crossing (urban) & lane merging (highway), and cross-border interoperability. These use cases serve one of the project’s main targets, which is to show that the proposed and implemented ICT infrastructure architecture is flexible, adaptable, and can serve the needs of various automated driving use cases (safety, comfort, etc.) with different requirements, across test sites with different capabilities. The ICT4CART use cases can be global or local, can be associated with network slices, can use Edge Clouds/Computing, can use different radio technologies and can be used everywhere (roaming aspect). They also consider mechanisms for cyber-security, authentication, integrity protection and privacy. For this purpose, four test sites are involved in ICT4CART, namely in Austria, in Germany, in Italy and a cross-border site at the Austrian-Italian borders. The main objective of WP8 is to evaluate the performance of the ICT4CART architecture through the proposed scenarios defined for each test site. This deliverable presents the results of the impact analysis, by assessing the value of the ICT4CART solution and use cases, paying particular attention to the end-user. The aim of the impact assessment as a process is to evaluate the project’s actions towards the road transport automation ecosystem. Unfortunately, due to the COVID pandemic, the consortium had to cancel all planned large scale and open to the public demonstration events. As such, only a few participants that were members of the ICT4CART consortium had the chance to participate in the evaluation events and provide their significant but rather limited to what expected feedback. In Section 1, the purpose of this document is described, as well as the audience it targets. In Section 2, a short validation of the project’s outcomes against the initial objectives is presented. Section 3, is dedicated to the project specific impact KPIs and how they were tackled during the project lifetime. Section 4, presents the potential long-term implicit impact of ICT4CART beyond its specific objectives towards different societal and environmental aspects. Section 5, provides a small summary towards the exploitation and extension of ICT4CART results by consortium members, whereas Section 6 presents the analysis of the small-scale questionnaire-based user acceptance. The questionnaire used is also presented. Lastly, Section 7 concludes the report