The first twinning meeting between CoEXist and US DOT funded research project took place on 11th January 2018 as part of the TRB annual meeting in Washington D.C.

The European Commission (EC) and the United States Department of Transportation (US DOT) have agreed to sponsor a twinning initiative to encourage collaboration between mobility-related projects in Europe and the United States. Twinning is the coordination of research activities in funded projects of mutual interest, and the collaboration of this research, on the basis of mutual benefit. CoEXist has been selected as the EU project on connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) to twin with a relevant project funded by the US DOT (https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/operations/17033/17033.pdf) on the analysis, modelling and simulation of CAVs.

After several preparatory conference calls, the first face-to-face twinning meeting between the EU and US delegations took place as part of the TRB annual meeting on 11th January 2018 in Washington D.C., USA. The two twinning groups agreed to actively cooperate and exchange on the following topics of their research projects:

• Development of an ‘Analysis, Modelling and Simulation (AMS) Framework’ for connected and automated vehicles,
• Exchange of information about use cases and case studies that will apply the AMS Framework,
• Cooperation on AMS tool development.

The EU delegation was represented by  Rupprecht Consult (CoEXist coordinators, Siegfried Rupprecht & Bernard Gyergyay), University of Stuttgart (Markus Friedrich), PTV Group (Jochen Lohmiller) and FEHRL (Thierry Goger). The US delegation was represented by US DOT (Joe Bared, James Sturrock, Gene McHale, Jeremy Raw, Scott Smith & Brian Cronin), University of Berkley (Steve Shladover, Alexander Skabardonis & Xiao-Yun Lu), Leidos (Zhitong Huang & David Hale), Northwestern University (Hani Mahmassani) and Texas A&M University (Alireza Talebpour).

The next twinning meeting is scheduled in May 2018 during the 3rd consortium meeting of CoEXist that will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden.