2017 STA INNOVATION AWARDEES
The 2017 STA Annual Conference & Innovation Awards was also the occasion to honour global innovators in the following categories:
Person of the Year: highlighting the achievements of exceptional individual accomplishment.
Best Innovation Project/Solution: underscoring teamwork that is breaking the existing paradigms for transportation infrastructures.
The 2017 Person of the Year award was conferred ex-aequo to Mr Andreas Rimkus and Prof Vittorio Giavotto.
Mr Rimkus is a Member of the Parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany (Deutsche Bundestag), where he has served as Deputy Chairman of the Committee of Traffic Affairs.
The Award recognises Mr Rimkus’s active engagement in the deployment of Smart Transportation Infrastructures since his election into the Deutsche Bundestag.
Prof Giavotto has been teaching Safety Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and Aeronautical Engineering for more than 40 years.
The Award recognises Prof Giavotto’s eminent career, and in particular his devotion to designing passive safety systems and to ameliorating passive safety standards. His contribution as Chairman of CEN TC 226/ WG1/TG1 since many years has resulted in the adoption of the European Standard for road restraint systems EN1317.
The project that stood out for the 2017 Best Innovation Project Award was: SMEV: Digital Optimisation of Traffic Conditions for Emergency Vehicles.
SMEV is a ground-breaking ITS cooperative system that changes the way of addressing emergency responses in the Smart City.
Resorting to geo-location services and not to signalling devices installed in traffic lights, SMEV provides an open path to emergency services i) by clearing junctions from disturbing traffic, and ii) reorganising in real time the traffic dynamics in the urban area surrounding the route to the incident.
The Award was collected by Mr Wolf P. Zeplin, CEO at SMEV International.