A new collaboration between top UK universities and industry partners has received £46 million in research funding to help find decarbonised transport solutions for the future.
The TransiT Hub, a collaboration between eight universities and 67 industry partners, has secured £20 million from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), alongside a further £26 million from stakeholders across the energy and transport sectors.
The eight universities involved in the project – Herriot-Watt University, University of Glasgow, University of Leeds, University of Birmingham, University of Cambridge, Durham University, University College London, and Cranfield University, will study ways to decarbonise various forms of transportation using digital twins.
Digital twins are digital replicas of the real world, created using data collected from the physical world in real-time. This allows different transport scenarios to be rapidly tested, analysed and improved. The TransiT Hub will analyse where and how best to deploy future decarbonised transport systems by examining data from digital twins.
On top of the £46 million in external funding, the partner universities themselves will also fund the recruitment of 18 PhD research students to work on decarbonised transport solutions.
Professor Phil Greening is a logistics expert at Heriot-Watt University and joint director of TransiT. He said: “Transport accounts for about a third of UK carbon emissions and, with global temperatures rapidly rising, we have run out of time to carry out real-world transport trials and learn from them. So, if the UK is to meet its carbon reduction commitments, we have to do our experiments digitally. We need to design the future transport system and optimise the transition to it.
“Digital twins will help us see the where, what and how to decarbonise transport. We start by building individual models of real-world transport systems. These can then be connected together and linked to the real world to give a bigger picture of what our future decarbonised transport system might look like – and the lowest cost way of getting there.”
Fleets and logistics
Two of the partner universities in the project – Herriot-Watt University and the University of Cambridge – will be examining methods of decarbonising logistics and road freight, something which has been increasingly in the spotlight in recent months.
Planning software provider Dynamon recently announced that it would be undertaking a trial of electric heavy goods vehicles (eHGVs) which will see them “pushed to their limit” to prove that they are viable for widespread use in commercial haulage.
Earlier this year, Transport Scotland launched its own plan to decarbonise its trucking fleet, called the HGV Decarbonisation Pathway. The plan will see collaboration between the Scottish Government and industry stakeholders to work towards decarbonized HGV solutions.
Last week, electric vehicle (EV) charging tech firm Paua announced that it was working with local authorities in two UK counties to try and bring shared EV charging depots to life for commercial fleets.
