On December 16th, 2020, our virtual conference took place where everyone was invited who is interested in the project UrbanSmartPark or in future parking-related services in general. All partners presented their achieved research results during the project year.

All presentations are now available here:

• NFF - Welcome and Introduction
• HH - City Requirements and Use Cases
• NFF AIP - Customer Needs and Services Design
• Fraunhofer - Services Platform
• NFF IfF - AVP Requirements and Challenges
• NFF IRW - Legal requirements for AVP in Germany
• Siemens AVP - Safety Challenges and Solutions
• Skoda - Customer experience assessment
• UTIA - HMI development
• CVUT - Customer Experience Assessment with Eye tracking
• NFF - Live Demonstration and Closing

On 9 December 2020, the consortium of UrbanSmartPark presented their research results at the Landungsbrücken in Hamburg to the public. The NFF demonstrated its Automated On-Street Valet Parking function so that interested citizen and press representatives were invited to take a seat in the test vehicle TEASY 3 for a demo drive. The automated driving function starts at the S-Bahn station Landungsbrücken where the driver would theoretically request the service of Automated Valet Parking. The vehicle receives the location of the next free parking spot from the backend of Fraunhofer, drives autonomously to the parking area and fulfills the parking maneuver. The event received very positive feedback and a lot of attention from the local press as well as from the citizen of Hamburg. The video below gives an impression of the overall event:

With the live demonstration in Hamburg and the virtual conference on 16 December, the project UrbanSmartpark officially ended. All project partners achieved very valuable results to improve and to design parking-related services. The work will be continued in future project funding frameworks.

The verification and validation (V&V) process of automated driving systems is complex and extensive as shown in the figure below. Virtual verification and validation are followed by extensive testing on the test track as well as on-road testing.

During V&V several aspects can be considered but our focus in this project was on the functional safety aspects according to ISO 26262 and SOTIF. The developers want to make sure that the system operates according to the specifications during normal operation mode, during failures and during limited functionality, too.

The real test environment – located in Hamburg, Germany – has been virtualized using Simcenter Prescan. The vehicle dynamics model is a 15 DOF (degree of freedom) model, built using Simcenter Amesim. The static environment, the dynamics objects, the sensors, the controller are all modelled using Simcenter Prescan (see short video). The validation and verification process – considering a scenario-based approach – is automated using Simcenter HEEDS Workflow Manager, which allows quick performance assessment and sensitivity analysis.

Real tests and demonstrations are planned in December in Hamburg. I’ll keep you posted.

One of the key elements of UrbanSmartPark is the implementation and public-effective demonstration of automated on-street valet parking. As the city of Hamburg is part of our consortium and provides with its TAVF (test track for automated and connected driving in Hamburg, further information see https://tavf.hamburg/en ) a perfect infrastructure for the implementation of automated driving, the demonstration will take place in the harbor area of Hamburg.

The concrete user story is the following: A drop-off area at the bus station Landungsbrücken is defined where the customer can exit his/her car. After requesting the automated on-street valet parking service via our service platform on his/her phone, the vehicle drives autonomously along the street Johannisbollwerk until an on-street parking area is reached. Via connected parking sensors provided by T-Systems, a free parking spot can be located where the vehicle executes its parking maneuver autonomously.

The development and implementation of the automated driving functions is done by NFF on their experimental vehicle TEASY 3 in collaboration with Fraunhofer who are in charge of the communication between customer, vehicle and infrastructure. In addition to that, further studies about customer acceptance with the help of eye tracking glasses are executed by CVUT.

Figure 1 depicts the demonstration area. The public-effective final event with live demonstrations will take place on 9 December 2020. Further information will follow.

One objective of UrbanSmartPark is designing customer-centric parking-related services. In order to do so successfully and develop solutions desirable for customers, it is essential to involve the potential customers in the process. That is why we are happy to announce that our transnational customer survey has launched!
Participants representative for the countries of Germany, the Czech Republic, as well as the Netherlands are asked to give their opinion on different services that base on technically feasible use cases selected by the interdisciplinary UrbanSmartPark consortium. If you have any questions or comments, please contact Antje Fricke.

The official start of the project “UrbanSmartPark” took place on January 20 and 21, 2020 in Braunschweig at the Automotive Research Center Niedersachsen (NFF) with a two-day workshop of all partners.

Industry representatives from Škoda Auto, Altran Technologies and Siemens/TASS were present, as well as science players from the NFF, UTIA, ČVUT and Fraunhofer SCS and representatives of the cities of Hamburg and Helmond as city partners.

The Europe-wide, two-year project aims at the development and pilot demonstration of automated parking functions on the road as well as the conception and provision of parking services. The definition of use cases, a market analysis and the prototypical implementation of automated parking functions are planned for the coming year. In the second year, concrete demonstrations in the city of Hamburg are planned, as well as studies on the commercialization of the developed products. The project has a project volume of 860,000 euros and will be funded with 600,000 euros in 2020.

The next workshop is planned for April 2020 in Hamburg, as this is also where the first demonstrations and possible market implementations will take place.