ITS European Congress 2023

To see the latest trends, we visited the ITS European Congress 2023 in Lisbon. The conference offered an exhibition with stands from various organisations and companies, as well as many thought-provoking presentations and panels. Much of the content was road-focused, but there were plenty intermodal subjects to be had as well.

Miroslav Haltuf took part in the plenary session "Integrating road, rail, air and waterborne – multimodality by any means?". The session was opened by Herald Ruijters, the DG MOVE director, followed by a panel of experts from all around Europe. Mr Haltuf spoke of the role of the Europe's Rail JU States Representatives Group in support of innovative and interoperable multimodal passenger and freight services, its involvement in building of the European Multimodal Transport Data Space and SERA. He also mentioned the cooperation with ERTICO to help the integration of the rail system as a backbone of ITS and digitalisation.

We met some very interesting people, including Torsten Klimke from the European Commission, Joost Vantomme from ERTICO, Damaris Gruber from AustriaTech, and Heita Mering from the Digital Logistics Center of Excellence in Estonia. Overall we had a number of fruitful conversions and talked "rail" to many people with the hope of future ITS congresses including more rail and intermodal topics.