The Awaken Sleeping Assets Project is a unique collaboration of cities (Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, and Hamburg), industries, and research partners representing four different European countries (Austria, France, Germany, and Sweden). It aims to gather and process relevant information at the local level on obstacles, success factors, logistics parameters, framework conditions, and impacts of sustainable urban logistics solutions.
The ASAP approach is located at the interface between applied research and innovation and thus follows the innovation pathway. Its methodological approach is systematic, testbed-driven, and solution-oriented. Within the already existing awakened sleeping asset testbeds, individual know-how and data are available, but there is a lack of evaluation results and a lack of standardization and little concern for transferability. Thus, valuable information is missing, or the information is not very helpful for interested cities.
The creation of new knowledge by synergistically bringing together transnational and transdisciplinary knowledge will allow the creation of new testbeds and innovative solutions, which will “awaken” more “sleeping assets”, driving the project. For a high level of valorisation of project results we aim at a financially and organizationally sustainable solution, ensuring a use beyond the end of the project.
The Awaken Sleeping Assets Project (ASAP) has three overall goals:
- to activate underused or inactive infrastructure or resources for sustainable urban logistics,
- to provide testing structures (testbeds) for innovative urban logistics systems and
- to combine these activities to build a new Sustainable Urban Logistics Planning Platform (SULP-Platform)
A unique collaboration of cities, industries, and research partners representing four different European countries (Austria, France, Germany, and Sweden) aims to gather and process relevant information at the local level on obstacles, success factors, logistics parameters, framework conditions, and impacts of sustainable urban logistics solutions. The result will be the SULP Platform, a new open-access knowledge base with interactive elements embedded in a network of European cities and regions.
Based on an in-depth evaluation of 14 existing testbeds in Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, Hamburg and Düsseldorf and a strong involvement of local logistics players we aim at bringing sleeping-assets-potentials into life. ASAP will create 11 further testbeds that activate underused, “sleeping” assets within the participating “lighthouse cities”. This will be the basis for building-up a network of “follower” cities by way of implementing an upscaling and dissemination strategy.
After identifying several weak spots in other platforms, ASAP strives to include the following important characteristics in the project’s unique SULP Platform that will have a strong focus on real testbed, user interaction, and long-term usability:
- Embedded and standardized method for the SDG assessment
- Profound information on real existing testbeds with high-quality information
- Possibility for users to interact with each other and to ask open questions to a user community
- Consideration of future-related Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) topics
- A clear description or animation of measures, ideas, and concepts
The platform will continue after the project’s completion because one objective is to find a viable business model for a long-term host.
Source: ASAP