Clean, sustainable, safe, energy-efficient, livable and quiet - this is the vision of a city of the future. Unfortunately, this ideal is still often lacking intelligent networking of data, services and concepts. In order to have a lasting impact on the traffic of the future, the EDAG Group has been researching a selection of urban mobility and transport tasks as well as municipal services since the beginning of the year.
Cosimo De Carlo, Chief Executive Officer of EDAG, reported on how this vision can be implemented at the TRANSEARCH Business Lunch in Stuttgart, the high-profile and established networking platform for top executives in an exclusive setting.
What is required, for example, are vehicles that are constantly on the move instead of spending 90% of their time parked waiting for their next assignment. Central to this are highly automated, multifunctional robotic vehicles - the EDAG CityBots - which move emission-free around the clock in urban areas. Here, the EDAG CityBots solve almost all the challenges of our cities and represent the mobility backend of the smart city. They take on the mobility tasks that are currently pending. These are assigned to the networked vehicles by a central control system. Residents can book transportation via an app, which also provides them with information about current traffic, values such as air pollution, the capacity utilization of public facilities, or even nearby locations of restaurants, stores, etc. The app can also be used to book transportation.
The EDAG Group is currently working on the implementation of this vision together with eight partners from science and industry in the research project „Campus FreeCity“ at the Eintracht Frankfurt stadium. Here, the EDAG Group will be setting up a real laboratory over the next three years to test this future ecosystem. This will investigate how the traffic of the future will be sustainably influenced by new fields of technology such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things or autonomous driving. The German Federal Ministry of Digital Affairs and Transport is funding the project with 10.9 million euros.
Mr. De Carlo emphasized how important EDAG‘s employees are in these forward-looking topics; but also how important the topic of management and performance culture is, which, in addition to all the work, gives employees sufficient freedom and also a framework to generate a disproportionately large number of creative ideas in autonomously acting teams. He placed particular emphasis on sharing his experience in the discussion: How to „generate performance power from below“ by involving and personally talking to employees at all levels. For him, it is important to have the same understanding of the meaning - the purpose - of the company. Purpose, according to De Carlo, is the glue that „connects“ not only women and men, but also young and old, as well as employees from different ethnic groups, and allows them to work together constructively and purposefully.
We would like to thank Mr. De Carlo for the forward-looking lecture, Markus Bischoff (DEKRA Club Restaurant) for the excellent catering and all participants for the donations received during the lecture for our TRANSEARCH heart project, the TRANSEARCH KinderHilfe Stiftung.
Due to the terrible war circumstances in Ukraine we decided to help the children there very quickly and bring the donations with the help of our partner ChildFund Germany directly on site to concrete projects. Here you can find out how TRANSEARCH KinderhilfeStiftung together with ChildFund Germany helps the children and mothers in Ukraine.
On our homepage www.transearchkinderhilfe.org you can see for yourself what you can achieve with your donation!