After the success of the first cycle of 6 webinars “Moving Forward”, which took place between April and June 2020, Altice Labs and V21 (Technology Incubation Center of Viseu) started on the 10th of March a new cycle “Moving Forward/2021 Edition”, dedicated to the theme: “New paradigms for the future of cities”.
On the 7th of April, the second Webinar of this series took place, following the same line “New paradigms for the future of cities” but now with focus on the “Smart Mobility” theme.
The session had the participation of José Couto, Chairman of the General Council of Vissaium XXI, AFIA’s President and Portugal’s representative at CLEPA; Paulo Marques – Founder of ALLBESMART LDA, Professor of Wireless Communications – Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco; Paulo Pereira – Director of Technology and Innovation Strategy of Altice Labs; Licínio Oliveira – Responsible for the Management of BMW In-Car Voice Systems at Critical TechWorks, as speakers, Pedro Carvalho – Responsible for the Innovation Ecosystem at Altice Labs, as moderator, being Sérgio Lorga, CEO of Vissaium XXI, in charge of closing the session.
José Couto made the first intervention presenting a framing vision of the theme of smart mobility, going through the environmental, technological, regulatory and economic aspects that are strongly affecting the automotive industry at this moment. He highlighted the profound technological transformation underway in the automotive industry, through the widespread availability of advanced information and communication technologies on board modern vehicles, directly supported by infrastructures supported by high connectivity requirements between people and objects. He talked about the profound socio-economic changes resulting from changes in value chains, the emergence of the sharing economy and new consumption patterns, decarbonization and climate change, the concentration of cities and new models of mobility of people and goods. He also highlighted the weight that the automotive industry has in the national and european economy, being the sector with more investment in R&D, over 50 billion euros and that resulted in 2019 in the registration of about 9000 patents by the automotive industry.
Paulo Marques talked about the concept of C-V2X (Cellular vehicle-to-everything) communication and explained in a very comprehensive way the technologies that are making smart mobility possible, from the old ones (802.11p) to the most recent ones, based on 5G (3GPPP). He then presented very interesting results of several projects of the Allbesmart company and several partners, in the area of vehicular networks and development of on-board units in vehicles, namely the implementation of pilots in the A23 motorway, and explained the need for standards to evolve, in order to support the most advanced use cases that will be required by autonomous vehicles. He also spoke about the European CEF2 programme that will support investment in advanced communication networks in road networks.
Paulo Pereira then went on to explain the perspective of the operator (Digital Service Provider) as the main enabler in the ecosystem of future smart mobility. He also shared the ongoing developments at Altice Labs in the area of MEC (Multi-Access Edge Computing), 5G OpenRadio networks, including 5G RSU (Road Side Units) and highlighted the importance of processing the data generated by the vehicles, highlighting that Altice Labs is developing a platform (Live!Data) capable of collecting and processing this data.
Licínio Oliveira presented Critical Tech Works, a joint venture BMW – Critical Software, based in Portugal and with over 1000 employees, dedicated to the development of SW embedded in vehicles from the BMW Group. In this content, he talked about the brand’s vision for the meaning of “intelligence in vehicles” and how this should be focused on the improvement of the passengers’ experience inside the vehicle, without ever neglecting the safety and privacy aspects. He then presented the BMW Group’s roadmap for the introduction of technology in its vehicles: Intelligence in the vehicle’s critical systems, permanent availability of Broadband communications, Cloud First data processing and storage strategy.
Sérgio Lorga closed the Webinar by summarizing the key points of each of the speakers, hailing the innovative capacity of the intervening companies, highlighting, in addition to the technological pioneering of the solutions used, the importance of the references that were made to co-innovation processes, the creation of value for users through personalized experiences, and the need to adopt viable and internationally scalable business models.
The session can be reviewed at this link.