TRANSPORT TELEMATICS PROJECTS IN EUS 4TH FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME

Telematics Applications Programme for Transport (TAP-T) was a DGXIII programme within EU's 4th Framework Programme (FP). TAP-T was a large programme containing 113 projects supported by 218M EURO of EU funding. The aim of TAP-T was to contribute to the development of the European industry and support the EU's transport policy objectives. The major problem in evaluating the results of the TAP-T projects' results was the lack of detailed information. According to the aims of the programme, the results are developed for the use of the industry, and thus the important information is not disseminated for public. Without this confidentiality it would be likely that the industry would not participate in the programme in this extent that they are currently doing. The confidentiality leads to situations where the only publicly available material is the final report of the project. The final reports give information on a very general level. Project partners, naturally, have access to the results of the project. The participants are also allowed to attend the project areas' concertation meetings and thus get information of the other projects within the projects area. The overall conclusion is that Finnish partners should participate in the projects and the project areas which deal with the, of Finnish perspective, important issues. This would enable Finnish actors to obtain all the relevant information of the projects and their results. EU's research programmes are used among others as a tool for developing standards. This was also the case for the TAP-T programme. Standardisation work requires a long preparation and consensus formation process before the standards are adopted. The partners who have been participating in the standardisation work will get the largest benefits of the new standards when the standards are coming into effect, because they are the first to provide to the market standardised products. This report describes all the TAP-T projects and their most important results. The results are also analysed from the Finnish perspective. The most useful results for Finland were achieved within the project areas of road, public, freight and train transport. Finland also participated in these project areas more intensively than in other areas. The TAP-T programme produced lots of useful information, but the essential issue from the Ministry of Transport and Communications' point of view is the exploitation of the results in practice. The results are naturally easier to exploit if a Finnish test site has been a part of the development project.