Theme
The theme of the conference is Enabling Circular and Decarbonized Vehicle and Transport Solutions.
Cars, trucks, trains, airplanes and ships provide a transport solution for people and goods. In doing so, they generate many economic and societal benefits. However, they also incur environmental burdens, such as greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion and environmental noise.
While technological improvements may support the integration of sustainability aspects, the conflict between transport and social as well as environmental impacts is at the heart of sustainable vehicle and transport solutions. Resolving it requires not only technological improvements of the vehicles themselves but also a rethink of the wider vehicles system and the behavior of the vehicle user.
Topics
The Organizing Committee invites contributions on topics including:
- Sustainable design in early vehicle and transport solution stages: Enhancing vehicle and transport solutions must align with environmental, economic, and social objectives. The early-stage design presents the best opportunity for enhancements due to its flexibility, yet it suffers from limited information, resulting in gradual changes rooted in past designs rather than transformative shifts. This topic focuses on integrating sustainability aspects, such as eco-design and circular design, into the design of vehicle and transport solutions. It also explores strategies for addressing paradoxical situations (e.g., the eco-paradox), and considering trade-offs in design decisions to create sustainable solutions meeting user needs.
For more information on the topic click here. - Transforming the product system: To achieve sustainable vehicles, it’s essential to transform not only the vehicles themselves but the entire product system. This necessitates managing the entire product life cycle (i.e., from cradle-to-cradle) of vehicle and transport solutions more sustainably, facilitating the shift towards a more sustainable product system. This topic delves into managing and transforming the life cycle or value chain of vehicles and transport solutions to enable more sustainable product systems. It encompasses pursuits such as circular economy strategies (e.g., repair, reuse, repurpose, recycling), sustainable supply chain management, and innovative sustainable business.
For more information on the topic click here. - Transforming the transportation system: Vehicles and transport solutions form part of the wider transportation and societal systems. Such systems are dedicated to moving persons or goods, their constitution (e.g., transport mode, infrastructure or guideways, operation plans) have great implications regarding sustainability impacts. This topic explores how transport modes can become more sustainable to enable the transformation towards more sustainable transportation systems. This concerns, for instance, considering powertrain electrification, e-fuel deployment or hydrogen vehicles. As such systems are characterized by high complexity, the investigation of potential rebound effects, as well as overcoming structural barriers for system change is of interest.
For more information on the topic click here. - Digitalization and digital technologies for sustainable vehicle and transport solutions: The design of sustainable vehicle and transport solutions, as well as respective product and transportation system transformation requires high-quality data for decision support. Such life cycle data is currently rather scarce due to data gaps in the value chains. In this context, digitalization and digital technologies could support the transfer, provision and analysis of data needed to support sustainable vehicle designs, support design trade-off decision, or identification of appropriate circular economy strategies. This topic places the focus on exploring how digital technologies can bridge data gaps along value chains, but also how they can support existing and new methods for incorporating sustainability into vehicle and transport solutions.
For more information on the topic click here. - Consideration of societal perspectives in sustainable vehicle and transport solutions: Vehicle and transport solutions, as well as respective product and transport systems have impacts on different societal groups. Those range from transportation consumers (e.g., drivers, consumers of public transport, etc.) to transportation providers (e.g., workers in vehicle assembly, transport workers, etc.). This topic investigates social sustainability impacts of vehicle and transport solutions, as well as transportation systems, enabling the identification of social topics that need to be considered when striving to enable sustainable product and transportation systems.
For more information on the topic click here.