ICCS – International Symposium “Navigating the Future of Traffic Management”

iLINK represented COP-PILOT at the International Symposium “Navigating the Future of Traffic Management”

iLINK represented COP-PILOT at the International Symposium “Navigating the Future of Traffic Management”, organised in Athens by the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens together with international organisations including ERTICO – ITS Europe, CEDR, PIARC, the International Road Federation and the European Commission DG MOVE. The Symposium gathered more than 400 participants and over 100 speakers from 35 countries across five thematic tracks, and included a technology exhibition and technical visits to motorway traffic management centres.

Across the Symposium’s sessions and networking, iLINK’s contribution to the discussion centred on distributed ledger technology and what it makes possible in transport and logistics. iLINK explained the role blockchain plays in COP-PILOT: a permissioned ledger records the operational events of a supply chain (the origin of a consignment, its handover between parties, the conditions under which it travelled and the moment of delivery) so that every participant works from the same record and no participant can revise it afterwards. In a chain where producers, processors, carriers and buyers each keep their own systems, this replaces reconciliation between databases with a single verifiable history, without requiring any organisation to hand its data to another.

iLINK also discussed the value of this approach beyond the agri-food chain COP-PILOT pilots. The same mechanism applies wherever provenance, custody or regulatory compliance must be demonstrated to a third party rather than asserted: the road transport of controlled goods, dangerous or energy products, cold-chain pharmaceuticals, and the emerging reporting obligations on the carbon intensity of freight, where an auditable record of distance, load and handling is what makes a reported figure defensible.

The second strand of the discussion was routing. iLINK presented the just-in-time logistics work carried out in COP-PILOT, in which dispatch and route planning respond to events arriving from the field rather than to a fixed daily plan. Delegates from traffic management authorities and infrastructure operators recognised the shared interest: freight routing that adapts to real conditions reduces empty running, unnecessary vehicle-kilometres and peak-hour pressure, which is a network-level outcome as much as a commercial one. Combining adaptive routing with a verifiable record of what was actually carried and when closes the loop between operational efficiency and accountability.

For COP-PILOT, the event was an Industry & Use-case activity addressing an industry audience. It supported the project’s dissemination and networking objectives by connecting COP-PILOT’s blockchain traceability and smart logistics results to an international community of traffic managers, road operators, public authorities, and technology providers.

Read the news on the iLINK website