Logistics require centralised planning and thinking. There is much research focusing on learning from ant colony and beehive analysis in order to create learning systems for logistics operations.

The STA Technical Committee on Smart Mobility, TC1, chaired by Dr Elena de la Peña (Asociación Española de la Carretera, AEC, Spain), has launched a survey to understand the perception of our readers on Smart Infrastructures, and on the future of Smart Cities.

The first STA General Meeting of the year was held on 27 February.

On 23 February 2018, STA’s Technical Sub-Committee on Road Restraint Systems (belonging to Technical Committee 2) reviewed the activities carried out since the last meeting held on 27 November 2017.

Following the project’s consortium meeting held on 23 January 2018 and the subsequent two-day bootcamp hosted by STA at the B19 Country Club in Brussels, the Market Acceleration Grant (MAG)2 call closed on 31 January 2018.

The network-wide-training programme of SMARTI ETN was launched in 2017 under the Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellowship programme (MSCA). After a number of preparatory months, all 15 researchers selected have started their PhDs across European universities.

On 18 December 2017, a signing act formalised the decision adopted during the last STA General Meeting to transfer the association’s headquarters to Brussels, Belgium.

The report examines the role of technology and smart engineering in addressing issues arising from the growth in traffic.

Well-recognised tools have been developed/used to assess the viability of transport infrastructure investments such as cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) which compare the costs of delivery and operation/maintenance to benefits generated by the infrastructure. Other techniques consider the environmental and social impacts of project alternatives such as life-cycle assessment (LCA) and social life-cycle assessment (SLCA).

Preceded by a Consortium meeting on 18 September, STA hosted the Mobilisation Bootcamp of the EU-funded fC2 Accelerator in its Brussels office from 19 to 22 September 2017.