Sustainable technologies and innovation for green corridors: Survey and application

A set of transport corridors within the European Area has been selected on the basis of the TEN-T priority projects, the Pan European Transport Network and project partner's proposals. This set of corridors is a workable sample of the European network sufficiently representative to validate the project methodology. Attention was then focused on the definition of a set of performance indicators (KPI) to be used for the evaluation of services on these corridors. A survey to identify sustainable technology candidates for the greening of the corridors has been performed, and the most suitable ones for the possible applications have been selected. Such technologies have been characterized by a set of specific parameters and their applicability to the corridors has been represented by means of a "Technology vs Application" Matrix. The technologies have been also characterized by their impact on the "green" aspect of the corridors in terms of variation of the aforementioned KPI. This evaluation has been performed using a qualitative approach. A tool for the definition and comparison of different scenarios of technologies applied on corridors has also been developed. Presently the technology application phase and the consequent development of the scenarios are on going and preliminary results on the Brenner Corridor selected as the Pilot Scenario are available. The aforementioned activities are part of the project "Supporting EU's Freight Transport Logistics Action Plan on Green Corridors Issues" (in short SuperGreen), which is co-funded by the European Commission within the scope of the 7th Framework Programme. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer review under responsibility of the Programme Committee of the Transport Research Arena 2012