The rapid urbanisation and increase in vehicle use in East Asia has created substantial environmental and social problems. In the UK, urban transport systems face similar issues, but generally at a smaller scale and at a much lower pace. However, a strong built-in inertia within physical, regulatory and societal infrastructure in western urban systems makes this challenging to tackle. Low carbon vehicle fleets for personal mobility and freight have the potential to contribute to reduction of the climate impact from urban transport as well as to improve local traffic and air quality conditions. The extent of this potential is however still unclear. Ample uncertainties remain regarding both the demand for fleet services and the most effective way to organise fleet operations, especially in the case of electric vehicles where interaction with the power grid becomes a critical issue. At the same time, a range of new business models for the operation urban freights and fleet services are emerging, enabled by pervasive ICT. Against this background, the overall aim of the LC TRANSFORMS project is to provide an integrated planning and deployment strategy for multi-purpose low carbon fleets and enabling urban infrastructure and to devise operational business models ensuring economic viability and environmental effectiveness. This aim will be attained by addressing 4 key research challenges: 1) Transport demand and network modelling tools for low carbon transport planning in urban areas have been outpaced by practical innovation in real-world urban transport and need to be brought up to speed. In particular, better integration is needed between urban mobility and freight modelling on the demand side (e.g. to capture substitution of shopping trips by home deliveries) and on the operations side (e.g. accounting for electric passenger and freight vehicles sharing a common charging infrastructure). Further improvement areas include representation of kerb space as a scarce and constrained resource affecting parking and loading operations of vehicle fleets, and better characterisation of fleet service customer heterogeneity (necessary for demand flexibility exploitation); 2) The new business models in urban fleet operation, in particular those operating in "demand responsive" modes and exploiting demand flexibility require the development of new operational management algorithms that ensure high quality of service, economic and environmental performances. This is particularly challenging in electric fleet operation where patterns of consumption of fleet services (freight and personal mobility), need to accommodate electric vehicle charging operations, when time-dependent prices of electricity and grid emissions factors are low. 3) The large scale deployment of electric fleets will pose challenges for the intelligent management of networked infrastructure for optimal operation of commercial fleets is largely understudied. This is true for intelligent transport infrastructure to optimise traffic management as well as the requirements of charging infrastructure and of smart charging algorithms to optimise environmental and economic benefits which have not been studied in detail for commercial for commercial fleets. 4) For scale investments to flow into low carbon transport, there is also a need for a new generation of policy appraisal tools that can deal with the interdependencies among networked urban infrastructures, (transport, power and IT). Such tools must take account not only of technical and functional interdependencies but also of the existence of multiple institutional stakeholders and of the substantial uncertainties affecting the flow of costs and benefits to different stakeholder over different time horizons. Consolidation of isolated initiatives to extend existing appraisal techniques, e.g. by the integration of ideas from Real Options Theory are required.

China remains the world's largest electric car market, and the UK is leading deployment of electric vehicles (EVs) to meet the new net-zero 2050 emission target. Both nations will face challenges in connecting EVs in urban areas due to limited land space, constraints on carrying additional power over traditional transmission lines and challenges in providing reliable power to critical load centres. This proposal identifies areas of common technical challenges and lays out a joint programme to analyse the issues and assess possible solutions. Urban areas are the significant location of critical loads such as hospitals, airports, public transport network and data centres. Fully exploiting the potential transfer capacity and resilience of the urban electricity network with a minimum capital investment is important to citizens and governments as 60% of Chinese population and 83% of UK population live in urban areas. To release the capacity of existing AC lines and to increase the reliability, a combined AC/DC configuration is proposed, and contribution of power electronic materials and converters are considered. Coordinated control of EVs, hybrid AC/DC networks and dispersed generation are investigated to optimise transfer capacity and enhance fault-tolerant operation with the support of Internet-of-Things (IoT) tools to enable an efficient decision-making. Two specific aspects will be investigated: the ability of IoT based data-driven modelling method to enable response services by coordinating dispersed resources in an urban power network and the headroom provided by power converters to accommodate this service. The contribution of IoT in providing useful data that enable the efficient management of urban power network is an emerging paradigm for the realisation of smart cities. As an essential part of daily life, optimal utilisation and reliability of electric energy becomes paramount. However, blackouts affecting the security and stability of the power system is an important issue. EVs storage capacity and optimal scheduling through power converters will be explored and quantified to provide grid support services in the event of an emergency situation. Protection schemes that can achieve fast and reliable identification and isolation with the aids of IoT, EVs and power converters are analysed in detail and re-engineering solutions proposed. Technical challenges from widespread use of dispersed resources connected to urban energy networks will be studied. Data-driven modelling will be applied to urban power systems to characterise the capacity of EVs and distributed generations that will allow two-way communication that transforms conventional networks into more secure networks. Traditional network topologies with the inclusion of power converters will be reassessed to eliminate potentially wasteful energy conversion stages and support flexibility services. Coordinated control of converters and distributed resources with spatial-temporary coupling and edge-cloud collaboration will be developed to make cost-effective, sustainable, resilient and fault-tolerant urban power system operation. The key outputs will be the data-driven modelling and analysis methods that can assess the spatial-temporary relation between distributed resources and urban electricity network (useful to system operators and equipment vendors); engineering solutions to map the capability of vehicle to grid services; optimal scheduling using power converters in the event of an emergency situation (useful to system operators, equipment vendors and EV owners); and verification through real-time simulation and scaled laboratory test systems. The main work programme will be conducted through international partnership with 1 China research institute, 2 China universities and 2 UK universities. Researchers involved in the project will benefit from the unique international collaboration and training.

The Urban Living Partnership pilot phase in Newcastle and Gateshead will diagnose the complex and interdependent challenges within the urban region, working collaboratively to co-design and implement initiatives and solutions in order to contribute to the life and development of the area. Led by Newcastle University and featuring project partners from across the Quadruple Helix model from government, industry, academia and civil society, we will form the Newcastle City Futures Unit and implement an inter-disciplinary and cross-sectoral approach to the initial 18 month pilot project, allowing us to synoptically approach challenges and develop a platform for innovative urban solutions. As a post-industrial urban area with more than 381,100 citizens, Newcastle and Gateshead form the heart of a contiguous urban conurbation of over 1 million people. We are a region facing numerous challenges, and perform below average on a number of socio-economic factors such as economic activity, educational attainment and health. Our pilot phase work will look to identify specific issues around these and other challenges, framed through our themes of "Ageing", Sustainability" and "Social Renewal", which have been identified previously as areas of particular significance for the city region. Newcastle and Gateshead provide the perfect platform to establish this pilot project, based on the success of the Newcastle City Futures 2065 project which was part of the UK Foresight Future of Cities programme. This work initiated collaborative working between HEIs and local authorities in the area in order to address long term complex city problems beyond traditional disciplines and sectors in order to reflect the complex government and organisational environment that is a hallmark of 21st century cities. This project acted as an urban incubator to identify themes through scenarios and Delphi methods which built on the existing assets of the city region to achieve innovation through research, policy development and demonstrator projects. The themes identified through this work were "the age friendly city", "the sustainable city", "the creative city" and "the science city", and along with evidence of a need for more detailed work to understand the drivers of change affecting cities. The work also identified the need for support for new digital platforms in order to exchange data across sectors, multifunctional demonstrator projects which offer innovative solutions to problems and opportunities across all sectors, as well as support for visualisation of long-term scenarios by bringing together expertise in areas such as computing, mapping, spatial analysis and urban planning. The Newcastle City Futures Unit will build on this, to establish an urban accelerator, to co-produce and collaboratively design practical solutions and policy recommendations in order to drive the future policy agenda and shape deliverable demonstration and innovation projects within Newcastle and Gateshead. An array of methods will be utilised across the duration of the project, including foresight futures methodologies such as Delphi surveys, scenario building and systems analysis work to help representatives from HEIs, businesses and civil society to identifying long term challenges in the city region and to create a vision for the future of the cities that can be replicated elsewhere. Visualisation techniques will also be implemented combining expertise in computing, mapping, spatial analysis and urban planning, with consortium partners facilitating identification of suitable case studies for the work. Through the work outlined above, the Newcastle City Futures Unit will build capacity amongst a wide range of stakeholders to realise communities of practice that are futures oriented and make a measurable difference to the cities and their citizens.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018 highlighted the need for urgent, transformative change, on an unprecedented scale, if global warming is to be restricted to 1.5C. The challenge of reaching an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 represents a huge technological, engineering, policy and societal challenge for the next 30 years. This is a huge challenge for the transport sector, which accounts for over a quarter of UK domestic greenhouse gas emissions and has a flat emissions profile over recent years. The DecarboN8 project will develop a new network of researchers, working closely with industry and government, capable of designing solutions which can be deployed rapidly and at scale. It will develop answers to questions such as: 1) How can different places be rapidly switched to electromobility for personal travel? How do decisions on the private fleet interact with the quite different decarbonisation strategies for heavy vehicles? This requires integrating understanding of the changing carbon impacts of these options with knowledge on how energy systems work and are regulated with the operational realities of transport systems and their regulatory environment; and 2) What is the right balance between infrastructure expansion, intelligent system management and demand management? Will the embodied carbon emissions of major new infrastructure offset gains from improved flows and could these be delivered in other ways through technology? If so, how quickly could this happen, what are the societal implications and how will this impact on the resilience of our systems? The answer to these questions is unlikely to the same everywhere in the UK but little attention is paid to where the answers might be different and why. Coupled with boundaries between local government areas, transport network providers (road and rail in particular) and service operators there is potential for a lack of joined up approaches and stranded investments in ineffective technologies. The DecarboN8 network is led by the eight most research intensive Universities across the North of England (Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York) who will work with local, regional and national stakeholders to create an integrated test and research environment across the North in which national and international researchers can study the decarbonisation challenge at these different scales. The DecarboN8 network is organised across four integrated research themes (carbon pathways, social acceptance and societal readiness, future transport fuels and fuelling, digitisation, demand and infrastructure). These themes form the structure for a series of twelve research workshops which will bring new research interests together to better understand the specific challenges of the transport sector and then to work together on integrating solutions. The approach will incorporate throughout an emphasis on working with real world problems in 'places' to develop knowledge which is situated in a range of contexts. £400k of research funding will be available for the development of new collaborations, particularly for early career researchers. We will distribute this in a fair, open and transparent manner to promote excellent research. The network will help develop a more integrated environment for the development, testing and rapid deployment of solutions through activities including identifying and classifying data sources, holding innovation translation events, policy discussion forums and major events to highlight the opportunities and innovations. The research will involve industry and government stakeholders and citizens throughout to ensure the research outcomes meet the ambitions of the network of accelerating the rapid decarbonisation of transport.