The year 2017 started the Vedia CaaS (Corridor as Service) journey. First, it was about the concept and how to connect smart logistics and intelligent transport systems (i.e. telematics). During the next two years, Vedia got a boost via the Business Finland growth engine program and EU CEF-funded FEDeRATED project. With these two enablers, Vedia was able to scale CaaS development to the EU level linking it to the core of logistics digitalisation development.
The FEDeRATED project has been Vedia’s main project for the last few years and under that, Vedia has been able to push logistics data sharing and digitalization on theoretical, practical, and technical levels. In the FEDeRATED project, Vedia has run three living labs. Living Lab 1 has been Vedia’s main living lab, where Vedia has planned and executed an automated border crossing pilot with Finnish customs and industry players. The last few years have not been as active for this pilot as was planned, due to the significant changes in the operational environment, i.e. the Russian attack.
However, the last few years have shown that technology is not the bottleneck anymore, although there are still many things we need to improve on the tech side too. Mainly these technical improvements need to be on how to improve security and trust between actors, i.e. how to ensure that data is shared for those actors to whom it belongs and only for those.
Although the FEDeRATED consortium has proven that when people have about the same ambition mixed with a sense of humor and a clear target, data sharing is doable. We must admit that the mindsets and trust between people are still the main reasons for slowing down data sharing between actors in both B2B and B2A environments. However, at the moment it seems that this knot is also slowly opening thanks to the general digitalization development and due to a few pragmatic use cases. Emission monitoring is one of those topics, which drive actors to share data among their stakeholder networks. Last summer this topic got even more boost due to the new EU’s new CountEmission initiative.
The second current topic that drives data sharing is the eFTI implementation, which is a hot topic now in all EU countries. The eFTI4EU project will continue the work of the FEDeRATED project and now 9 member states are about to develop a reference eFTI architecture model, which later on can be implemented on a national level to enable interoperability and trusted data sharing among logistics stakeholders.
If you are interested to hear more about this work please join us in the FEDeRATED final event or contact me directly.
Author:
Lasse Nykänen
Project Director
lasse.nykanen(at)vedia.fi